Oh Say Does That Star Spangled Banner Yet Wave...

Hello!

Happy 4th of July/Independence Day!! (to our American readers) Happy Monday to everyone else! I know that's a corny title, but I always associate the 4th with cheesy, corny stuff... does that make me a bad American?

Today I have a mani that I'm actually quite proud of. A lot of thought, planning and time went into it. I really hope its a unique idea, because I wanted to do something different. My idea was to make it look like if I had painted an American flag onto my whole hand, including my nails, and then erased the image from my skin but left it on my nails. Confused?

Here's what I mean,

How did I do it? Its quite simple actually. I sat with my hand in that position on the flag and then just sketched what each nail would have to look like in order to complete the flag. I eye-balled the angles and the sizes of the stars and fortunately I'm pretty good at that.

Then I painted my base colors, the same colors as yesterday, Cherry Red, Dark Denim and French White. I did my thumb and index red, my middle and ring blue and my pinkie white. Then I painted the modified diagonal Frenches freehand on my pinkie, index and thumb using the appropriate colors. Then, I very, very, very carefully and slowly painted the star on my ring nail in white and the half of the star on my middle, using my smallest nail art brush. I wasn't happy with how the stars looked, so I went around them using the same brush in the blue. And royally f**ked them up. After much cursing, I cleaned the brush and tried again with the white, cursed the American flag for having stars, took it back, even though I'm not superstitious, cursed some more, and finally made the stars look halfway decent and left them alone. (Stars are f**king hard to paint, man!!)

After taking some pictures, I decided that since it was the 4th, I needed to go all out, so I added glitter. I added the same glitters as yesterday (Ruby Pumps, Beware and Strapless) over their corresponding colors and then took some sunlight pictures outside in the sweltering summer heat (the thermometer says 86 degrees, but it feels much warmer with the humidity)

My fingers aren't in the right spots in these sunlight pictures and I'm sorry for that. I'd redo them, but A) I'm not leaving my air conditioned room to go outside again and B) After taking these, I smudged my index nail :( Also, sorry for the lack of cleanup. I thought they weren't that bad, but then when I looked at the pictures, they told another story...

Placement FAIL! Haha the sun was so bright I couldn't see well enough even with my sunglasses on, to see if they were exactly in the right spots! Sorry!

Blurry for maximum glitter effect!! Small because no clean-up is ugly!

I even did my toes for today!

All the usual disclaimers apply to pedi pics (do not recommend you enlarge, blah, blah, blah...) Haha, funny story about the vertical stripes on the flag toes... I didn't realize that the stripes on the flag are horizontal not vertical... I'd already added the blue before I realized that so I couldn't fix that... whoopsie.. I think I made the same mistake on my mom's nails that I posted yesterday, I'll have to go check. Wow, FAIL!! The rest of my toes aside from my big toes which are just the creme colors, are the creme colors, with a coat of the glitters over them too but you probably can't tell unless you enlarge the pictures, which I don't recommend...

Well, I hope all you Americans have a safe and happy Independence Day, 4th of July, whichever you call it!! I'm probably off to eat dinner soon where we're probably having a good ol' American cook out with good ol' American hamburgers and hot dogs and I will eat my hot dog and baked beans like a good American and then eat too much ice cream, also like a good American... :) See, I can be patriotic for one day a year. :P 

And I hope everyone else has an awesome Monday night, wherever you are!! :)

Thanks for looking, commenting and following!!

Fiona