Manicure Monday (102): Be A Friend

Hi and welcome to Manicure Monday, a feature that combines my love of reading and nail polish. Each week I’ll showcase one of my current reads along with a matching book manicure. This week’s manicure is a very special one to me. Over the weekend, I was a volunteer at the launch party for the beautiful new picture book by Salina Yoon (Penguin and Pinecone, Stormy Night, Found). BE A FRIEND is her newest picture book and it’s a sweet and touching story of an unusual boy named Dennis who finds an unexpected friend. I saw a very early copy of this book and was very impressed and moved by it. The book is great for both children and adults and I highly recommend it!

I knew that I wanted to create and extra special manicure for the launch party. The images in the book are beautiful and I had a lot of inspiration to work with.

I used a little bit of editing magic in the image above to put together the pictures of my individual hands into one big picture. :) The book has a limited color palette which made picking colors very easy. I painted my nails with a base of either white creme (Cult Nails Tempest) or an off white with yellow undertones (Lime Crime Milky Ways).

I used Zoya Sooki for the red and American Apparel Hassid for the black. I also used some acrylic paints the the brown and grey parts of the manicure. On my left hand, I painted Dennis’ face on my thumb. I was actually planning to put him on my middle finger but forgot that his face was painted white in the book. My middle finger was already painted with the off white shade and I did not want to re-do it. For the dotted line art, I used my red nail polish and a very thin nail brush to draw in the dotted lines. This was actually a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. The stripes I made using a nail stamping plate. I tried just using nail tape at first but I could not get the stripes to be even. The stamping came out a lot better.

I painted Joy on my right hand using acrylic paints. I don’t usually do a lot of detail work on my right hand (since that means painting with my non-dominant hand), but Joy was relatively easy and I didn’t mess up too much. You can see that my index finger on my right hand is a little wonky. It’s supposed to be dotted lined stairs but I don’t think I had enough width on my nails to make it look really good. And, as you can see, the red smudged when I went in with top coat later. Again, the stripes were done with a stamping plate and the heart was drawn freehand.

Overall I am pretty pleased with how this came out. I love the color palette in the book and it was so fun to create this look. Please check out BE A FRIEND if you get a chance. It’s a really fantastic book and I am so happy to have a copy in my collection now. Also, happy MLK Day to everyone in the U.S. I don’t have work today and plan on catching up on my reading and errands. Have an awesome week, everyone!