Monochrome Halloween

Halloween is not a big holiday over here. We don't have a tradition to go trick or treating, dress up or decorate our homes in style. It's slowly gaining ground though, like anything that's commercialised these days. I've never liked gory stuff, I don't watch horror. I prefer vampires over zombies (but I did enjoy watching Warm Bodies and have not seen the Twilight Saga). I prefer the simple spooky stuff. So my halloween manicure is ordinary spooky. And monochrome like our vision in the dark. The polishes I have used are therefore greys, black and white.

From left to right:

• Max - DNC 206 Metal
• NYC - 003 Prey of Grey
• Catrice - NEONaturals LE C05 Have A Good Day
• Barry M - Nail Art Pen Black
• Barry M - Nail Art Pen White

I started with a grey gradient, the darkest day near my cuticles. The Max polish is a super cheap one, smells horribly, but I don't own that many greys (I think just these 3). When the gradient was dry I added top coat before starting on my drawings.

On my thumb I used the darkest grey to create tombstones, just with the bottle brush. When it was dry I wrote RIP with the white Barry M pen. I need more practise writing with these pens, but it looks okay. On my index finger I drew a bat with the black Barry M pen and then with the white pen I dotted the eyes. My middle finger sports a simple ghost, again created with the Barry M pens. I'm already in love with them. So glad I bought these when I was in London.

My ring finger has a black cat showing some fangs. I found the tiny details difficult with the pens, especially with the white, guess the polish flows differently. Finally on my pinky I created a spider. We've got lots of European garden spiders (in dutch we call them "cross-spider") in our garden doing their best to keep the mosquito population down, so I wanted  to honour them on my nail. Personally spiders do not scare me, if I find one in the house I catch it and take it outside. They'd get eaten by the cats otherwise, so I'm doing them a favour.

I'm very pleased how these turned out, but I have to say my right hand does not look this good. I tried a different bat design and the spider looks more like an ant with extra legs *chuckles*. Perhaps I should have made sketches on paper first, but I used my right hand for practise instead. I entered this design in Miss Lipgloss's Halloween Nail Art competition, not that I'll win, some of the manicures entered are amazing! But better to have tried and failed than not tried at all!