Blood on the Pages - Bloody Manicure

Hey there Internet Peoples!

Sorry I haven't been around as of late, life just kind of got in the way of making a proper Blog post. Never fear, though! I have indeed been painting my nails and taking photos of them! I have quite the back-log too, so hopefully I'll be able to post once a day for a while....Depending upon how lazy I feel.

First up we have my horror novel inspired nails! Complete with tutorial.

I like to write fiction, and have more half done starters for horror novellas laying about on hard drives than I'd like to admit to. So when I was looking through different manicure styles for ideas and saw the always elegant Newspaper Print my brain naturally thought "That would look better...bloody!"
My brain is twisted...And likes to pause for dramatic effect.

Pretty cool right?



After finding a very helpful tutorial on YouTube ( As can be seen here) on blood splatter I was off! More pictures after the cut and I'll tell you how you, too, can have a bloody good manicure!

Get it? Bloody good? Oh never mind...

• Before starting with the polishing get your supplies in order:
• Take a newspaper (the fresher the better) and cut out ten nail sized pieces of paper. 
• Get a small glass and put some rubbing alcohol in it. 
• If you want to use a sponge to hold the paper onto the nail with get one of those, too, though I discovered using your finger to hold the paper down gives a bolder transfer.
• Tweezers.
• Acetone.
• Cotton buds.
• A post-it not or a small piece of paper.
• For the blood splatter portion of the tutorial: 
• Get yourself a straw. I used a normal sized drinking straw for this, though I've read good things about using those little coffee stir straws.
• Get a large piece of paper or a small towel or whatever you prefer to protect your work area with as the blood splatter part of the tutorial will be MESSY.

Now the fun can begin! 

• Start off with a good base coat. Base coat is our nail's friend!
• Put down two even layers of a white or grey polish. What I'm wearing for this manicure is a custom grey I made by mixing some black polish in with a terrible white that had been destined for the bin. Don't forget to wrap them tips!
• While waiting for your polish to dry completely put your strips of newspaper into the alcohol and use the tweezers to push them under the liquid.
• Once dry use the tweezers to put the newspaper onto your nail. Use a sponge or a finger to hold the paper securely to the nail and count to ten or so. Slowly peel the paper off and admire the beauty of newspaper nails.
• Repeat the last step nine more times on all your other nails and wait a couple of minutes for them to dry.
• Once dry, blob some red red polish onto your Post It note or small piece of paper. The color I used here is called Ruby Ruby by Sinful colors.
• Use your straw and try to get as much of the polish into the one side of the straw. Load'er up. A slightly less messy way of loading the straw up I discovered is to just dip the straw right into the polish bottle.
• Position the straw over the nail you wish to bloodyify and blow. It may require more than one go with the polish.
• Repeat the last three steps for the rest of your nails.
• Allow time to dry. Thirty minutes would be preferable just to give everything a chance to dry and set so the next step doesn't ruin all your hard work.
• TOP COAT! Use a nice, thick bead to reduce the likelihood of smearing your work.Don't forget to wrap the tips with your top coat as well.
• Use cotton buds and acetone to clean up your mess. Unless you're going out for Halloween, then by all means leave them messy ;-)
• Apply lotion, cuticle oil or anything else you'd like, but apply something. The acetone has a habit of drying out your skin.

And VIOLA! Bloody Newsprint nails! 

Base Coat: Seche Clear
Top Coat: INM Out The Door



Of course the procedure to get those happy little blood splatters is messy, like I said before. With the straw and all the red splatter my workspace workspace wound up looking like a murder scene from NBC's Hannibal - As seen here by my workspace:

The scene of the manicure crime!

And, really, I should have taped up my fingers prior to blowing the bloody bubbles. As you can see by my post clean-up photo, your workspace isn't the only place to catch the brunt of the mess.

"You did what with your bare hands?!"

But all mess aside, this was a fun manicure to do and got a lot of attention :-D I highly suggest giving it a try.

Hope you guys enjoy it, and if you try it leave a comment and tell me how they came out!



'Til next time!

-
 Nerdy