Guest Post from The Little Canvas

Good morning everyone! Today's guest post is from Alaina over at The Little Canvas. Alaina was one of my first blogger friends, and she's really helped me a lot through this whole process. She's always been really patient with my questions and I just can't thank her enough! Plus, she does some great nails! 

So, lets check them out. 

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Hello there!  Alaina here from The Little Canvas!  I am so happy that I am taking over Miss Casey Lane's blog today!  I met Casey on Twitter earlier this year, and was quite impressed with how neat and perfect her nails always looked.  Due to this, I named Casey my first ever Nail Artist of the Month back in May.  If you haven't seen that post, you must click here and see it!  After she did the guest post, I started pestering her that she needed to start a blog.  Literally, I think I tweeted or sent her a text daily with a "where's your blog" or "you need to start blogging."  Thankfully, she finally listened and now is sharing her work here on Blogger.  Great decision, right??

After being asked to do a guest post here on Casey's blog, I started to think what I could possibly do.  I'm always inspired by Casey's kitchen sink manicures, especially the one she did for my blog and Tuxarina.  I decided to build off of that inspiration and create a kitchen sink manicure for this post.  The problem: I had no idea what colors to use.  This is the only reason I dislike having so many bottles of nail polish, picking out colors can take a looong time.  Casey came to my rescue though and picked out teal and pink!

Once I had my teal, pink, white, and black polishes picked out, I got to work.  Let's take a look.

Colors Used:

INM - Bikini

OPI - Can't Find My Czechbook

Hard Candy - Black Tie Optional

Orly - Liquid Vinyl

OPI - My Boyfriend Scales Walls

Kind of funky, right?  I started off with a base OPI My Boyfriend Scales walls on my ring and thumb.  No matter how this kitchen sink manicure was going to go, I knew I wanted those nails to both be white based.  I then added a black nail on my middle finger because it just looks sharp that way in my opinion.  That left my two main colors which I just slapped on the pointer and pinkie.

Then, I glared at my nails.  I had no idea what designs I was going to do where.  My mind started going crazy.  Was I going to use tape?  What nails were going to be dotted?  Could I put art on the colored nails?!  Goodness gracious, what did I get myself involved with with this manicure?!  Since I had the black and white nail, I remembered the awesome black and white matte glitter that is Black Tie Optional by Hard Candy.  I figured that this would be the best tie in with the plain colored nails.  Added the glitter, and sat back happily.

Then I got out my tape and started taping up my ring finger.  I figured you can never go wrong with a unique checkerboard.  I'm rather pleased with that nail.  No kitchen sink manicure though is complete unless there is some form of polka dots.  I first did the black nail with pink, teal, and white, and loved how it looked.  I thought it would look really neat to do the same thing on the white nail with black dots instead...kind of like a reverse nail (if that makes any sense).  To be honest, these polka dot nails were my favorite of the whole manicure.  I really feel that they both tied the manicure together.

What do you think?  Fan of the kitchen sink?  Liking the colors?

I hope that you, as well as Casey, enjoyed this manicure!  If you want to see more of my random nail art, head on over to my blog and check them out!!!  Hope to see you all soon! 

<3

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Alaina I love this!!!! Kitchen sink manis are one of my favorites, so one in my favorite colors is PERFECT! 

Thank you so much for this post! It's great!

~casey

PixieDust Leopard!!!

Good morning polish lovers! I hope everyone is having a good day so far! 

I have to say, I am super excited to bring you this manicure. A few weeks ago I ordered the entire Zoya Pixie Dust fall 2013 collection. Around the same time I did my first Leopard print mani... and then I realized I haven't seen anyone do an all PixieDust leopard mani! I knew I had to do it. I love Zoya, I love PixieDust polish, I love nail art... so being able to combine all three was such an exciting idea for me. I didn't mention this leopard idea to anyone, I just kind of kept it stewing in my brain. Then last weekend I was playing with my nail wheel and tried it out. It looked great to me, but I needed my good friend Alaina's opinion. (aka TheLittleCanvas) I sent her a picture, I knew she'd be honest with me if it totally sucked. She loved it too, and after we threw ideas back and forth for a bit we decided it would be a great opportunity to do some #BestieTwinNails for Instagram. Alaina is way more experienced than I am with blogging and nail art, and she's got a special gift with PixieDust nail art... so I was thrilled to do a little collab with her. Go check out Alaina's blog and Instagram as soon as you can, she's great and super sweet. Her version of these turned out fantastic! 

Here is our stitched photo for Instagram, both with topcoat. We were pretty matchy matchy huh? :)

Now for some solo shots of my version. I took pictures of this both with and without topcoat. For the textured look, you need to leave the topcoat off. But adding a topcoat gives you a totally different (and more sparkly) look. 

First I'll show you the textured look.

Full Sun, textured

Full Sun, textured

Full Sun, textured

Light Box, textured

And here it is with a couple of coats of Seche Vite. 

Full Sun, topcoated

Full Sun, topcoated

Light box, topcoated

Light Box, topcoated

For this look I used the entire Zoya Fall PixieDust Collection and Pixie Dust in Dahlia from their first PixieDust Collection.

Here are the colors and names for you:

Black - Dahlia

Gold - Tomoko

Blue - Sunshine

Green - Chita

Orange - Dhara

Purple - Carter

Pink - Arabella

I started with a base of 2 coats of Tomoko on all nails. Then using a medium size nail art brush I started painting the colored spots. Some colors required two coats (Carter needed 3 in some spots), then using a fine nail art brush I painted the lines in Dahlia. I used 2 coats of Dahlia on all nails so that it would really pop as black. I think leopard print nails are one of the absolute easiest types of nail art to do. You don't want it to be perfect, the less perfect your spots are the better. So it's pretty fail proof! 

I highly recommend Zoya's PixieDusts. They are by far my favorite of all of the textured polishes out there. They are textured but not too rough, matte but also sparkly, and the colors and formula are fantastic. 

What do you all think? Do you like this? I was very excited to do it because it's the first time that I came up with a mani that I hadn't seen before. I've seen lots of textured nail art, and it all inspires me. But I hadn't seen a full textured leopard design yet. You should give it a try! If you do let me know because I want to see! You can tag me on Instagram or send me a message on kik or email! 

Instagram & kik: caseylanelovespolish

email: caseylanelovespolish@gmail.com

Thanks for reading! 

~casey

**all polishes in this post were purchased by me for my own personal use**

Minion Nails!!!

Hi everyone! I hope you're all having a good week so far! I've been a little under the weather, but I'm starting to feel better. I think it's mostly just allergies. Why do we say "just allergies" anyway? I mean really, if you have allergies like mine there's no "just" about it... they suck. 

But this isn't a blog about allergies, it's about nails! And these are some of my favorite nails that I've done. Who doesn't love the Minions from Despicable Me 1 & 2? They are some of the most lovable characters ever. We had a hectic 4th of July weekend, but my sweet husband took me to see it the next weekend. So of course, I had to have Minion nails for the occasion. 

This was before I started a blog, so I only got a couple of pictures, and they aren't great. But they're enough to get the idea. I used this pictorial by the amazing Alaina over at The Little Canvas. You should go follow her blog if you're not already, for real. 

On to the pictures. 

Colors used:

Ulta Blue Streak

Ulta Sun-Sational

OPI Black Onyx

OPI My Boyfriend Scales Walls

OPI Kiss Me On My Tulips (for the little tongue) 

and Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Celeb City

I free handed their little overall tips with the polish brush, then with a detail brush I painted in the strap for the goggles and their mouths.Then with a dotting tool I made silver dots, let them dry a bit, then white dots, let them dry a bit, then the little black pupil. Overall it was a really easy look to accomplish!

I hope you all enjoy looking at these as much as I enjoyed doing them and wearing them! You can't help but smile when you're at work and you look down to realize your minions are doing your work for you. ha :) 

Thanks for reading!

~casey

***all products in this post were purchased by me for my own personal use***

My first blog post.

I thought I'd share my very first blog post ever. Back in April the sweet Alaina asked me if I would be willing to be her first "nail artist of the month" feature on her blog. I was completely floored, flattered, nervous, and excited. I have a hard time being proud of my work, and the thought that someone else liked it enough to feature it was a HUGE deal to me. The watermark says Nails by CaseyLane because that was my original nail account on Instagram. It got deleted by Instagram and never restored, so I set up CaseyLaneLovesPolish.

I know May was a while back, but I wanted to share it anyway. Go check it out! The Little Canvas: May Nail Artist of the Month.

***all products in this post were purchased by me for my own personal use***