Challenge Day #3: YELLOW nails

Hello lovelies! Happy Friday :)

Today's challenge is yellow nails. When I think of yellow I always want to do the bumblebee nails... but everybody and their sister does that. Daffodils? Eh... easier with acrylic paints and I typically don't use those on nail art for myself. I was a bit uninspired until I remembered that I'd always wanted to do half-moon nails, but with sunshines! (Half-suns?) So I went for it... the process was interesting and it didn't turn out quite the way I'd imagined, but I still really like it!

I wanted a yellow gradient, so I started using the Nailasaurus' famous gradient technique using 3 Sally Hansen X-Treme Wear colours: White On, Mellow Yellow, and the orange is Sun Kissed. I wanted some subtle but yellowy-golden shimmer, so I added a coat of Essie Good As Gold over it. I love that it's dense enough with tiny golden flakies and barely-there shimmer to be noticable, but the base is not tinted, and the white still looks white. At this point, my nails looked like this:

Terrible picture, but it's the best one I could get.

Check out the Nailasaurus at the link above, she's got mad gradient skills.

Then, I cut out little sun-shaped half-moons out of an old AAA sticker I found laying around. This bit was painstaking, but it was a slow day in the office (if any of my coworkers are reading this, um, just kidding?) and I got all ten done throughout the course of the day. I didn't think to get a photo of them until I was nearly finished, but here is what they looked like--9 used, one still waiting to be applied to my nail:

Holy ridic glare, Batman. Objects in photo appear larger than they really were.

I cut them to fit perfectly across my rather tiny nail beds.

Then, I painted a careful coat of Revlon Colorstay in 170-Coastal Surf over the areas that were still exposed. Can I just say how awesome this polish was for this design? Perfectly opaque in one coat, dried quickly after I'd removed the sticker, and the perfect sky-blue to be a backdrop for the suns. So pretty! Lastly, a medium-thick coat of good ol' Seche Vite for quick-drying, shine, and protection. Like I said before, it didn't turn out quite the way I had envisioned, but I love it anyway:

Suns shining in the sunshine. Aww.

What do you think of this sunny yellow design? At first I had the vague idea that it reminded me of something, but I couldn't think of what it was. After a day of wearing them and staring at them, it hit me. Good ol' Sunny D. Or Sunny Delight, as we called it back in my day.

Hope you all have a lovely sunny weekend! xoxo