Monarch!

After much frustration I scrapped the photos for my two most recent manicures as this camera just could not photograph glitter at ALL. I hope to redo them when I have access to a better camera, but for now I chose to do a glitter free look inspired by monarch butterflies. For the record, they look like this:

Photo from Wikipedia

Unfortunately, I didn't budget nearly enough time to do my nails before heading out the door, so my first look with this one was a fun french tip orange design with one monarch accent nail. Please forgive the ultra-blurry cell phone pic.

With that accent nail, I used a paint brush to add the black lines and had a lot of issues with polish flooding my cuticles. So, as I came home that evening i bought one of the Sally Hansen nail art pens in black to give that a shot. Here's what happened:

A monarch inspired manicure I am pretty pleased with! I kept the original accent nail after cleaning the edges with acetone and a pointed Q-tip and painted the black over the existing tips. Fun! Here's some more shots:

And a couple of the bottle of orange I used. It's a Sally Hansen Diamond Strength Limited Edition shade that I only recently spotted at my local Ulta, released for Summer 2012. It's called Moonlit Dance and I'd describe it as a bright orange with a yellow-gold glass fleck. Very pretty and perfect for my butterfly look.

If you try this yourself, I'd love to see! Link it to me in the comments.

Happy painting!