Manicure Monday (44): Shadowdance

Manicure Monday is weekly feature where I combine by love of nail polish and reading and share with you one of my current reads along with a matching book manicure. Enjoy!

Hi and happy Monday! Mondays mean manicures here on the blog and today I am featuring Shadowdance by Kirsten Callihan. The book just came out last week and you get bet your butt that I started reading it right away. I am a huge fan of this series and tore into it as soon as I got it. I don’t want to give anything away but I really enjoyed it and now the countdown starts again until the next book comes out.

It took me a while to decide what to do for this cover. In the end, I decided to focus on the clock tower and the texture of Mary’s awesome dress. (Note that I am really not sure why Mary is fully dressed and Jack has his shirt half open – not that I’m complaining.)

For my middle and ring finger, I created a gradient using Cover Girl Inferno (red/orange), Flamed Out (orange) and Sulfur Blaze (yellow/gold) – all from the recent Hunger Games collection. Just use a makeup sponge to lightly dab the color where you want it to create a gradient. I then used brown acrylic paint to paint the outline of the clock and several numbers.

For the other fingers I painted them all with a base of a really pretty golden bronze brown by Maybelline. It’s a really old one and I forgot to write down the name but I think it was something like Burnished Bronze. I wanted the stripes to have some depth and decided to use a textured polish to give it a three dimensional look. I cut and taped thin strips of tape onto the dry bronze base and painted over them with OPI Honey Ryder, a Liquid Sand shade. Then I pulled off the tape and voila, stripes!

It is a bit difficult to see the texture in the pics but it was more apparent in person.

And there you have my Shadowdance themed nails. If you haven’t read this series yet, do it. It’s fantastic and I haven’t read a bad one yet. Thanks so much for coming by today. Hope you’ve all got your Christmas shopping done. :) Have a good week!