December 30, 2013

Manicure Monday (45): Taste of Darkness

Hi and thanks for stopping by Manicure Monday, a weekly post where I who you what I’ve been reading along with a matching book manicure.

This week we have a special Manicure Monday for you. To help our friends at Read Now Sleep Later kick off the Maria V. Snyder Taste of Darkness blog tour, I created a manicure inspired by the cover. Be sure to hope on over to Read Now Sleep Later to read the interview with Maria and wish her a happy book birthday.

Please excuse the crappy quality of this picture. Since ToD has not come out yet, I could not pose with the actual book and instead pulled up the cover on my mom’s iPad. I like this in theory but in real life it was hard not to get glare and reflection while taking this pic and the colors are off because of it.

I really liked the mix of green and purple in this cover and decided to use those colors as the basis of my manicure. First I put two coats of Zoya Belinda, a great shimmery purple from their most recent winter collection, onto my middle, ring and pinkie fingers. For my other two fingers, I decided to do a gradient of greens to match the way that the cape on the cover gradually gets lighter at the top. This was with OPI Jade is the New Black mixed with Cult Nails Tempest (white) to create lighter shades.

I painted lilies onto the purple nails using acrylic paint and a small brush. It was pretty hard drawing the flowers and not having them just look like white blobs. They’re a bit like a Monet painting – good from far away but kind of a mess up close.

The green nails were pretty boring so I decided to spruce it up a little bit and used a dotting too to create the pattern of the belt of the cloaked figure onto my nail. That came out pretty well and made the manicure a little more interesting.

Here is the whole look. I am glad that I challenged myself to create something that’s outside of my comfort zone. The flowers were difficult but I like the outcome. . I did a few other manicures based on Maria V. Snyder books, which I’ll be featuring down the road.

Congrats to Maria on her new book. Don’t forget to check out Read Now Sleep Later‘s interview and blog tour stop with Maria.