Thursday, October 1, 2015

Themed Thursday - October 1st: Jack-o-Lanterns

nothing to disclose 

Hello, all! Hope your week is treating you well! I have a VERY exciting new challenge to share with you all called THEMED THURSDAY! My nail bestie, Kelli from The Nail Polish Challenge, and I dreamed up this weekly challenge as a way not only give ourselves inspiration for manis, but to also give you, our readers inspiration!

Before the start of each month, we'll share a graphic like the one below on Instagram (and likely on my blog as well!) that will have a theme and challenge prompts for each Thursday of the month. Our first theme? Halloween of course! We're so excited and would absolutely love to have any and all of you partake - just use the hashtag #themedthursdayoct so that everyone can see what you've created. I hope you'll join us!!


The first prompt for this month is pumpkin/jack-o-lantern. I considered trying to paint both regular pumpkins and also a jack-o-lantern, but when I got in my head to try this design out, I was sold on a good ole' fashioned carved pumpkin!

This mani is an offshoot of one of my all time favorite manis - these bonfire nails I did last summer for the Digital Dozen. I loved the glow effect and I wanted to try and give the pumpkins a similar glowing look.


I started with a base of Zoya's Arizona and then did a black to orange gradient in a large arc around my middle and ring fingers. Then, with orange acrylic paint, I added the base for each pumpkin. With black, yellow, and white acrylic paint I added in the face, followed by the stem with green paint. To finish up, I added a few white dots for stars (or whimsy!?) and added a matte top coat.

Overall, I like how these turned out! They were more difficult than I anticipated and I don't think they really glow as much as I wanted them to, but hopefully the effect is still present.

I'd love to hear what you think of both the mani and the challenge. Let me know if you'd want to participate and just jump in and go for it! Since it's a weekly challenge there is ample time to plan and execute manis so we'd love to have you.

Happy Polishing!