Take Two Day 9: Inspired by your location

For those of you who live around here, you'll know what I'm talking about. For those of you who don't, let me explain. Now for those of you who are nosy, you have probably seen that I live in New Jersey. Naturally when people think of New Jersey, they think of the Jersey Shore. I actually thought about doing this on my nails, but after Hurricane Sandy tore through, I don't think I can. So instead, I decided to do New York City.

12DoC Dec 9: Snowmen

Well, I got this one done, guys. I only have 1 more final left, so hopefully I'll get caught back up real soon!

Take Two Day 8: Polka Dots

If you guys have been following my blog for a while, you know that I LOVE polka dots. Since this was right after the black and white prompt, I super excited to use color for this one. This, of course, means rainbows!

Take Two Day 7: Black and White

I did it again. I reserved a post so that I could have the date match up with the day of the challenge. Hey, I like it when things are orderly! Anyway, after a long, long night of doing and redoing my nails, I finally came up with a simple, yet elegant design that I'm really quite fond of. By the time it came time to take pictures, my cuticles were screaming, so I moisturized them as I slept. :P Anyway, I hope you like them as much as I do! 

12DoC Dec 7: Candy Cane

I was so excited for this challenge! I've always wanted to make candy cane nails because they look like so much fun.

As much as I love free-handing my designs, I really wanted the crisp, clean lines to pop in this design, and they couldn't do that if they were sloppily free-handed on. Anyway, I thought it would be cool to show you guys just how much striping tape I used to get these stripes. It looks like chaos!

Take Two Day 6: Animal Print

I'm back on track! So the deal with last night was that I was preparing for my speech class today. All went well, thankfully!

So for today's animal print, I couldn't decide what to do. I typed "animals" into Google and found this gem. They looked so cool that I had to try and recreate them!

12DoC Dec 5: Holiday Song

Thankfully, I was able to get this design done before I ran out of time! 11pm is cutting close. Homework comes first, though.

Take Two Day 5: Cartoon Theme

This was such a hard design to come up with. I had so many ideas in mind! All the ones I wanted to do have people with peach colored skin. I don't have peach colored nail polish.. So I was stuck at a stand still. Then I thought of maybe doing Pixar's Minions, but I didn't have the right yellow for it. Finally, I decided that I would do some Domos!

I always picture them saying," Om nom nom." But that's just me... Haha.

Take Two Day 4: Flowers

Oh boy guys. Today was far from fantastic, and it didn't help that today's challenge scared me slightly. I was always horrible at drawing flowers when I was younger, and then I found out that I had to paint them on my nails?! Well, good news. I figured out a solution!

Take Two Day 3: Inspired by Your Country

I live in the US, so the first thing I thought of (unfortunately) was hot dogs. Why? For some reason, I have it in my head that people from other countries see us Americans as fatties with Southern accents eating hot dogs. Yeah... I couldn't tell you where I came up with that from. Anyway  I wasn't about to paint hot dogs all over my nails. I don't even like them! So I tried to think of something annoying that is trending in my country. Hence, the YOLO nails were born..

12DoC Dec 2: Christmas Tree

A day late isn't so bad considering I found out about this challenge a few hours ago, right? Talk about a little too much free time today. Kidding. I still have homework to be done. It'll just be done later.

In order to get this design up in time, I had to brainstorm fast. I found this challenge a few minutes before I had to leave to go to my running club. Talk about a time crunch! So while I was running along earlier, I decided that I really wanted to use some polishes from the OPI James Bond collection that I got a few weeks ago. There is this gorgeous red in there.. Just look at it!

12 Days of Christmas Challenge

Call me crazy, but I entered another nail art challenge. I knoow it's going to be difficult with finals coming up next week and everything, but I'll manage. I mean, they aren't called challenges for nothing, right? 

Anyway, when I decided to join in on the Take Two challenge, I was a little sad that I would only get to do Christmas nails only once. I was planning on doing a few Christmas nail designs on my own time sometime during the challenge. Then I came across the 12 Days of Christmas Challenge (12DoC) , which I am now using as an excuse to do Christmas nails. Haha. It's perfect! So now I'll be posting 10 nail designs per week all through December... It sounds like so much work now that I typed it out!

The 12DoC challenge was created by Pink & Polished and Over Polished since there weren't any Christmas Challenges going on. I'm so glad they created it. I'm psyched for this challenge! Here are the upcoming challenges:

You'll notice that I missed the 2nd. No fear! I already did it. Now I just have to post it.

 Anyway, I hope I'll have everyone's love and support to get through both challenges. Be sure to like my page on Facebook to be sure that you won't miss out on any of the fun!

Take Two Day 2: Flag Nails

Today, I chose a flag that's not as close to my heart as I would like it to be. For those of you who don't know, I'm a redhead, so you'd think I'm hard core Irish. Well, I am Irish, but my family doesn't celebrate anything to do with the Irish culture. I've been taking it upon myself lately to learn a bit more about their culture and history lately, but I haven't gotten very far yet. I do have an unbelievable craving for Irish soda bread, though. :P

I kept this design real simple. I didn't want to try anything too fancy. I'm really happy with how well it turned out. I was afraid that the colors I chose wouldn't look very well together.

Take Two Day 1: Inspired by a band

GUESS WHAT! NAIL PICTURES ARE BACK!!! I'm so excited. You guys have no idea. My software arrived a couple hours ago. I installed it, tried it out, and LOVE it. You might be wondering what exactly I'm talking about.

Well, since my Photoshop Trial expired, I've been looking for new photo editing software. I only tried the free ones and hated them all with a passion. I looked up how much Photoshop was and almost had a heart attack when I saw that it was around $600. No way was I getting that. So I did a little research and came across a Photoshop product that I had never heard of. It's called Photoshop Elements 11. Basically, it has about 90% of Photoshop's functions, but it's sooo much cheaper. It doesn't have all of the fancy extras and it looks different than Photoshop, but it only cost me $50. It's definitely worth it. It has all of the features that I use and it's just as easy to maneuver. I consider this a success! Here's a picture of it:

I'll stop yapping about my software and get to the reason why everyone is here. My nails! :D