PCFSC: #36; What I love about Spring

As I have mentioned in the past; I live on a farm. It's not one of those animal farms, no, it's a fruit/vegetable farm. My mother is one of the best strawberry farmer ever - I'm not saying this because we're related but I'm saying this because it's completely true. She hand plants every single plant, hunt for bees to create a hive to pollinate them and then spends hours in the hot spring-summer sun picking each berry (even if it rains heavily or when she had severe Carpal Tunnel Syndrome). She's honestly amazing.

The strawberries always turn out tiny at first but jammed packed with flavour but as the season progress, they can get up to a size where you can only fit a maximum or 4-5 in your palm and still have enough sweetness to make you semi choke. I especially love ours because not only are they sweet but they're also "crisp" - they don't feel as slimey nor soft like the supermarket ones. Our strawberries are always ready to be picked around November (that's the last month of Spring down here) and I always look forward to packing them into little plastic chips because I can eat as many as I want, tehehee.

However, mummsy has retired from the strawberry farm early last year (good thing she did, it was way too much hard work for her) but it still reminds as the thing that I love the most about Spring!

PCFSC: #25; Spring Stripes

Everything about today's nails cries off "Spring is here" - I'm just surprised that it look me 25 challenges and near the end of the entire thing to find my spring pastels that already existed in my collection. Hahaha.

I think this looks like a baby room or shower on crack topped off with some gentle glitter.

PCFSC: #17; Bulb to a Flower

Remember the Spring Gradient manicure that I did 2 days ago for the Purple Crumpet Fairy Spring Challenge? Well I really had to think about today's nails but decided to recycle the gradient as part of a "symbolic" NOTD.. I actually thought a lot about how to explain it so here I go, lol

In USA.. and probably most northern hemisphere, they have a saying that goes "After April Showers comes May Flowers" which totally explains the glitters, haha. Along with that, I tried to play on the riddle  "What has 4 legs in the morning, 2 in the afternoon and 3 in the evening?" in the form of a flower; Bulb to a Flower.

I should had used a different colour for the flower but at the time I was painting it, I had read that the Long Headed Poppy blooms within the dawn and wilts during the day, interesting huh?

PCFSC: #16; Spring Gradient

Another skittles, yay!

I did a Yellow --> Orange gradient today for the Spring Gradient. I have no idea why the yellow KaSi polish always end up looking slightly green in photos but it's definitely not that colour in real life. Kind of made the gradient less "smooth" with that random undertone of the polish. Oh wells, just add some glitter and everything will be fine!

PCFSC: #14; Pastel Skittles

Skittles, yay!

I really love this NOTD except for the green finger - I wish I picked a more yellow-green pastel or that Kleancolour had, had released a darker green (which would still be good if they did that now). I couldn't find a good spring glitter that suited all these colours and I just can't leave them look plain so I HAD to stamp them with something flowery, hehe.

PCFSC: #11; Pastel Patchwork

I'm not a big fan of the patchwork manicure because I'm just dreadful at making the black lines thin and patchworkish or I can not draw patches without placing them evenly around my fingers. I was meaning to stamp different patterns onto each patch with a corresponding darker colour but my stamping plates were already packed away for my trip to university.

PCFSC: #4; Spring Water Marble

Ahh... The dreaded Water Marbling... One day I shall master you enough to clearly show where I made pattern using the tooth pick but until then, this is all I have to show. One day.

So... I think it didn't turn out very spring-ish so I added Fairy Dust on top to create subtle shimmer but it didn't make it any better!

 

PCFSC: #1; Valentine's/Love

New Zealand isn't much of a country that celebrates days like "holidays" such as Valentines. I had a bit of trouble thinking of ideas for today's challenge... the only real thing I know about Valentines is that it is the day of love. However, I did not want to make it too tacky with reds, pinks, and hearts so I decided on some Valentines candy which I saw on Futurama. They look unbelievably cute and vintage... surprise, surprise, New Zealand doesn't have them!

My "word painting" isn't very good... errr... yea. I'ma say this manicure is "Happy Un-Valentines" as it looks as if someone is plotting to kill someone with poisonous valentines candy. Hahaha.

I noticed that this manicure would have been awesome if I had this stamping plate; it's definitely wishlisted :)

Day Twenty-Seven: Inspired by Artwork

Another quite vague challenge for today. I noticed everyone is being inspired by really famous paintings made long time ago that now hangs in the museum nowadays. To me, art is almost everything. There's artwork from a fellow best friend who is now an aspiring photographer, there's artwork in manga tankōbon which cost so much but barely feeds the artists, freelance artwork all over deviantart, etc, the list goes on. For me, I decided to get inspired by artwork in a game, I love gaming, don't hit me but if I had to give up gaming or cosmetics, I'll chose cosmetics - That's how much I love games.

Tiny Tower

The artwork is absolutely amazing in this game and the little bitizens that you control are just as adorable... who would have thought a game this good would be completely free? I sure didn't believe it when I saw the price tag (You can download it here if you own an apple, I think they have a version for the android too). Anyways, I chose 4 of my favourite costumes that the bitizens can wear, the panda, the cat, the frog and the ninja and skittled them across my fingers on both hands. 

I have one real thing to say, "Strippling brushes are absolutely annoying!", I have no idea how anyone is able to control since a long brush with inconsistent polish dripping off it.

Day Twenty-Five: Inspired by Fashion

Today's nails are inspired by Nicki Minaj's tights from the Victoria Secret runway where Orlando Bloom proudly cheered for his wife, Miranda Kerr. Nicki Minaj is very famous for her quirky outfits but this one stood out the most for me.. it's soo bold and brightly coloured.

Nicki Minaj 

on the Victoria Secret Runway

I didn't notice that there was a contest that is being held by O.P.I for the release of the Nicki Minaj Collection when I was painting until I started seeing a huge hoard of them being posted on everyone's blog. You can look at the entries here and I'm so sorry that this is another Nicki inspired manicure - I bet you're sick of seeing them! 

Day Twenty: Water Marbled Nails

This was the challenge that I dreaded the most out of all of them because it's really messy and wastes a lot of polish.... and did I say messy? I've tried it out in the past but it didn't turn out so good and clean up was just horrendous. I have to say this time was a lot easier but that's probably due to the fact that I'm now used to painting my nails almost daily, hahaa.

First I tried to do a rainbow one, Yes.... I really love colour, but the water I used made it difficult to make patterns in the water before it started to stick to the toothpick. I decided that 14 colours was way too much for me to handle so I closed my eyes and reached into my bag to pull out 5 colouring pencils, luckily they didn't contrast too much with each other! Unfortunately, it was still way too hard to make any sort of pattern in the polish in the cup of water so it didn't turn out too interesting... but I still really like it :)

Day Nineteen: Galaxy Nails

Originally I was going to do something like Emerald Sparkle's Galaxy Nails but even with her easy-to-understand tutorial... mine didn't have the same results. After 4 retries, the sponges that I have been using went too hard for these finer details so I ended up picking a couple of colours to go on top of the white nebula instead. People who can actually do these galaxy manicures are my envies, it's definitely a lot harder than it looks and even more harder than it sounds, hahahaa.

Day Twelve : Stripe Nails

Last week I broke my arm and haven't really got used to it yet. I wanted to do a neat tape stripe manicure for this challenge but even when both my arms could freely move with a huge cast in the way... I sucked at tape manicures. Instead I resorted to freehand lines which I don't quite like - it reminds me of painting hard boiled eggs for easter ( and I was inspired by this springish background of stripes).

Also, the colour combination is something I didn't chose... It was the boyfriend's idea! He deliberately chose 5 colours that he thought would not go together just to troll me, *Shakes fist at him*

Day Nine : Rainbow Nails

Hmmms... we've all seen those dotty rainbow manicures like these on the blog, Nails by Kayla Shevonne. I wanted to do something similar to that but thought it might be too unoriginal and tried to "spice it up". I dotted them dots in an irregular line. It looked fine for the first two rows but as I started dotting the other colours.. I realised that it looked uber tacky with big gaps everywhere (under the rhinestones).

Day Three : Yellow Nails

When I think of yellow... I think of golden glitters and my favourite shape in the entire world. Stars.

Unfortunately, what I intended to do in my head did not have the same outcome on my nails because... I'm a horrible stamper, hahaa. Either way, it still looks pretty fun and and we can pretend those fail golden stars are meant to be gold leaves, lol.