Halloween: Bats and Spiderwebs!

Hello errrbody! Today I'm going to give the challenge a miss and show you a couple of Halloween-inspired manicures I've worn lately! I love Halloween--yummy candy, fun spooky things like bats and ghosts, the colours, and dressing up in costume is really fun! And, of course, the chance to use some of my Halloween nail stamping plates! Warning, this is sort of a longer post, and has more pics than usual since I'm showing you two designs in one :)

The first one is inspired by this video by JaeMarie2008 on YouTube! She's got lots of cute designs, but this one really stuck out to me, because I super love bats! I think they're so adorable, even though most people seem to think they're gross or scary. I've always dreamed of having a pet bat that would sit on my shoulder and follow me around and stuff, like a parrot. Or a falcon. And I could hand-feed him fruits and berries and insects, and it would be the cutest thing evaaarrrr!

*ahem* Anyway. Right. Onto the nails:

Bats! Haunted house! Scary tree! Orange shimmer! :D

Spooky yet cute! I started with two coats of Orly Melt Your Popsicle, which is actually a very neon orange that came out this summer. It's super bright and fun, but I wanted to make it a little more Halloween orange, plus add shimmer, so I added a coat of Zoya Gabrielle. Gabrielle is a very sheer orange polish with tiny orange and yellowy-orange glassfleck shimmers. It's really gorgeous, but would take a LOT of coats to wear alone. I like layering it over things :D

I then grabbed some black polish (Soulstice Spa's Gotham, to be precise--it seemed appropriate for this mani!) and sponged a bit on the tips with a little piece of an old washing-up/kitchen sponge. Then I used black Konad special stamping polish to stamp on the some images from a couple of Bundle Monster plates--the bats are on plate BM13, and the haunted house is on BM-305. I then used black Stripe Rite striping polish to draw on a few more smaller bats freehand, and some spooky tree silhouettes. Finished it all with Cult Nails Wicked Fast topcoat.

A whole Halloweeny haunted forest scene at my fingertips!

Managed to get a pic of both hands, thanks to some creative holding of my tablet and the "delayed shutter" feature. Word up to that. Also, the orange looks more colour-accurate here, it's not as melony as it looks in the first two pics.

The second design is darker--silver spiderwebs on dark purple:

Forgive the messy cuticles. I'll explain :P

First, a quick moan about the purple: this is Cult Nails Spontaneous, which I fell in love with at first sight and HAD to buy when it first came out. Yummy dark grapey purple with sparse bright purple microglitter? Yes please! And it really is a beautiful polish, but oh my lord, it is a nightmare to work with. Cult Nails polishes are generally absolutely perfect to apply, nice creamy formulas, but this? Ugh. Not sure if I got a bad bottle, or if this colour just didn't work the same. It's thick and meh and would be bald in some places and thick and clumpy in others, no matter how carefully I applied it. I normally really enjoy painting my nails, but I was so fed up with it after finally getting this to look right that it took a while before I came back to them and added the webs. This is like 3 or 4 coats of Spontaneous, coats where I'm dabbing in some places and removing excess in others and ARGH.

...Buuutttt I did eventually come around, and used Sally Hansen Silver Sweep to stamp on the spiderweb image from plate BM13, just in random places on the nails. I absolutely loathe spiders, and didn't want to add any of them to the design, but these pretty silver webs over the purple were both delicate and spooky :) Topped it off with Orly Sec 'N Dry topcoat.

Yeah, I was so fed up by the time I got to this stage I didn't even bother trying to get the cuticles perfect. This was the best I could do. It just would not cooperate. But, look how bright and shiny the webs are!

With flash, so you can see just how magnificently shiny these are :D They were flashing and catching the light every time I moved my hands!

Whew, long post! That's all for now, though. I'm going to post my artwork-inspired nails soon, and then hopefully get another Halloween design or two in before the 31st.

See you next time--hope the start of your week is delightful! xoxo