October 28, 2013

Manicure Monday (38): The Book Thief

Manicure Monday is a weekly feature that combines my love of nail polish and reading. Each week I’ll show you one of my current reads along with what’s on my nails.

Hello again! I hope you all had an awesome weekend. It was super warm here this weekend but it’s supposed to be cold tomorrow so crossing fingers that it actually happens. I can’t have a warm Halloween. That would just not be right. I did not reach as much as I thought I was going to this weekend but I did get a lot of house stuff done and I have part of a Halloween costume. The lovely Alethea (aka frootjoos) made a Louise Belcher (Bob’s Burgers) hat for me. I was there but I did not really help. I “supervised.” I don’t have a dress yet but the hat is pretty awesome. You can see it on Instagram here. Sorry that was off track a bit. Let’s get back to business.Today’s manicure was inspired by The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.

As you can see, my copy is a bit battered. I am one of the few people I know that has not read this book yet. I am going to the book signing on Tuesday and figured that it was a good reason to start. I don’t know if I will finish by then but I am OK with that. I really like it so far. It’s written in a way that I didn’t really expect that it unique and really compelling.

I had some trouble matching the colors to this cover. I originally started with a base of Zoya Avery on all my nails and then decided it was not yellow enough. So I sponged on some yellow (it was by Nubar) which helped. I then used a whole plethora of browns and cremes and a beauty sponge in an attempt to match the colors of the cover. I am still not sure that they match really but it looks pretty good from far away.

The whole cover has a sort of vintage photo look and I did not want to have any hard edges, so I used the flat end of the beauty sponge to create the soft rectangles of the dominoes. I then went back in with American Apparel Trenchcoat and a dotting tool to make the dots.

The written word is very important to this story and I knew I wanted to incorporate that somehow. I decided to do a newsprint mani on some of my nails. You can find tutorials online but basically you dip strips of newspaper into alcohol and press them onto your painted nails. It turned out well and you can see it on my pinky above.

I also realized when I was editing these that I totally forgot to take a pic of my right hand, which I painted differently. I will take a pic tomorrow and add it later. I hope you enjoyed today’s manicure. If anyone else is going to the L.A. signing at The Grove, let me know, and we can say hi. Have a great week!

ETA my right hand