Spring Bee

I had two different themes to complete and both had a spring theme. It was natural want to have flowers or fuzzy baby animals, but as I was letting my cat out into the yard yesterday (and leaving the door open so her coward butt can run back inside if a car goes by) I realized that spring means “bugs” to me more than anything else. It means I need to close the screen door to keep the fruit flies out of my bananas. So mundane! 😀

Since I didn’t want to do nail art based on fruit flies, I decided to honor bees instead. Spring is one of hardest times of the year for bees. Their winter honey reserves are likely to be low while we humans yank up early blooming “weeds” like dandelions and plant flowers that are pretty but don’t necessarily provide food for them. So if you have a yard, consider planting bee friendly flowers this spring. Give love to bees. We need them desperately.

My index finger was mostly painted light purple with some yellow for the center of the flower. Then I colored the flipped over parts of the flower petals darker purple and filled in the rest with “Ice Blue” and “Spring Bouquet” before applying the decal to my nail. So much sparkle! For the rest of my nails I started with a yellow to bare nail gradient on all but my pinkie fingers. Then I used three coats of “Spring Bouquet”–gradienting it out a little so the yellow peeks through. I think if you limit yourself to two layers of these Ultra Holos, you can sort of change the color in a lot of lights to what you painted underneath but once you hit shade/low light the shimmer will definitely show. I originally wanted to stamp with a honey brown color, but I decided it would show up better with white so I stuck to that. Then it was just coloring in all the decals and positioning them on my nails. I’ve come close to de-stashing “Ice Blue” because it’s so sheer and I (still) have too many blues like that. However, this is an amazing color for adding a little bit of umph to a transparent insect wing. Love it and will use it again.

Nail art products used

• Base Polishes: ILNP’s Color Kissed Ultra Holos “Spring Bouquet”, OPI’s “I Just Can’t Cope-acabana”, Sinful Colors’ Kylie “Kashmere”
• Stamping Polish: Mundo de Unas’ “white”
• Advanced Stamping Polishes: ILNP’s Color Kissed Ultra Holos “Spring Bouquet”, OPI’s “I Just Can’t Cope-acabana”, Sinful Colors’ “Lavender” and “Ice Blue”
• Stamping Plates: Born Pretty BP-46 (large flower), Harunouta L044 (beeees, bee hive, honeycomb bee)

Items in italics were used for the first time

I was afraid I wouldn’t like this one, but it turned out better than my other nail art with a Color Kissed Ultra Holo as the background color. Having such a “noisy” background color is both fun and a pain because it directly competes with whatever you put on top of it. I suspect this is why I prefer linear holos to scatter holos: they take less attention away from the nail art. And now so you can see just how “noisy” this lovely holo can be, here are some photos taken under a natural light lamp:

Crumpet’s Nail Tarts 26 Great Nail Art Ideas (Spring Animals):

30 Days of Colour Challenge (First Day of Spring):