Tiff's Guest Post Series: Poppy Nail Art for Remembrance Day

Hi guys, so here in Canada we are celebrating Remembrance Day tomorrow and I wanted to do some nail art featuring poppies.

In case you don't know, we wear poppies because of the famous poem "In Flanders Fields" by John McCrae. John McCrae was an artist, poet, surgeon and soldier in the First World War. And he was Canadian. According to popular folk lore,  McCrae wrote "In Flanders Fields" while sitting on the back of a medical field ambulance after presiding over his friend Lieutenant Alex Helmer's funeral. Poppies were abundant in the fields of Ypres. McCrae died of pneumonia in 1918 ten months before the end of the war.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow


Between the crosses, row on row,


That mark our place; and in the sky


The larks, still bravely singing, fly


Scarce heard amid the guns below.



We are the Dead. Short days ago


We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,


Loved and were loved, and now we lie


In Flanders fields.



Take up our quarrel with the foe:


To you from failing hands we throw


The torch; be yours to hold it high.


If ye break faith with us who die


We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

So I grew up hearing this poem read every year and I know the words almost by heart. I always get a little emotional reading it. If you're curious about John McCrae and his poem, all the information I wrote about was from Wikipedia and there is more there if you're interested.

Ok on to the nail art. I've seen a lot of poppy nail art before, but there was two really looked at as inspiration: Will Paint Nails for Food Freehand Poppies (here) and Set in Lacquer Popping Up With Poppies (here).

So I started with 3 coats of OPI My Vampire is Buff. This one has been a lemming of mine for a while now and I am really excited to finally get my hands on it. I will have it swatched alone sometime this week. I did the poppies using polish mixed with acetone to give it a water-coloured look. The poppies are primarily Sephora Cherry Popsicle (swatched here), with Sephora Dangerous (swatched here) as a shader. The stems and greenery was China Glaze Exotic Encounters. I used Essie's Matte About You as the matte top coat. There's a step by step at the end!!

Check out my new friend!!

Its actually a fly! Not a bee! You can tell because it has 2 wings, not 4
and the antenna are aristate (wrong shape for a bee) 

This is a poppy husk! Find one and shake it all over your garden
 and you'll have poppies galore the next spring!

1. Draw general poppy-ish shapes in red, water-colour with acetone for easy shading
2. Add stems to each poppy and then fill in gaps with grass and leaves
3. Add shading to each poppy using a darker red (try to make each unique!) and add oval black dots for centres
4. Add tiny white dots to black centres (1-2 each) to add shine and pop!

I hope you guys have a good Remembrance Day if you celebrate it, and take a minute to remember the people who have sacrificed for our countries.

Tiff's Guest Blog Series: Sephora Cherry Popsicle

Hey Guys! Happy Saturday! What are you guys up to today?

So this is the last Sephora mini that I picked up last week! So this isn't the most unique colour by any means, but its actually my favourite! Cherry Popsicle is a bright chilli pepper red creme that is opaque in two coats. Surprisingly I don't have any reds like this, so at least this one is unique for me! I also like the way this collage turned out the best out of all of them!! Let me know what you think!

  

 Hope you guys have a good weekend! I'll have a new picture polish on the Blahg tomorrow so stay tuned!

Tiff's Guest Blog Series: Sephora Shark Attack

Hey guys! This is the next Sephora mini I have swatched for you!! This is yet another one with a summer name... This one actually looks the most summer-y to me though. I picture it with big yellow sunflowers drawn on. :) I'll have to do that when the monsoons clear for the year. Haha!  Here in Vancouver we get rain rain rain until June-ish.

Okay okay on to the polish, this is a bright sky blue creme polish. I want to call it cornflower but when you google that you get some pictures of a light purply blue, and some of the vibrant greeny blue I'm thinking of. What do you guys consider a cornflower blue?? Am I thinking of something else?

So pretty right!!? Maybe the least seasonally appropriate, but I really like it none the less!

Tiff's Guest Blog Series: Sephora Surfin USA

Hey guys! How's your week going so far? Mine's been a little frustrating, I've been trying to hunt down a few older OPI lemmings with no avail! Arghh! I have a few more places to try before I give up... I'm really hoping to find one of those salons with a 2 for 16$ deal and a good selection of older collections. Ya... I'm dreaming aren't I??

So the last post I did was about a mini that I got at the till in Sephora a while ago, and todays post is the next one! I'm really not sure what collections these are originally from because I thought Sephora discontinued all their polishes when they launched the Sephora X Collection and that was quite a while ago. But the name Surfin USA sounds like a summer collection to me!! Ironically though this polish is a fall colour in my opinion. It's a gorgeous teal creme that falls onto the blue side of the spectrum. I really love teals, but the last teal I bought ended up looking more forest green on the nail than I wanted. This one is perrrrrfect. Its dark and vampy but it never looks black, and its clearly a teal, not a forest green.

Formula wise this one is smooth and easy to use. The lid is attached to the brush so its a little difficult to use, but I got the hang of it after awhile. All in all a dollar well spent I think!! 

Tiff's Guest Blog Series: Sephora Dangerous

Hey Guys! I hope you all had a good Halloween! Mine was quiet, my plans got cancelled last minute so I ended up staying in. Which is fine, I'm not a huge party girl! But I love dressing up..


Anyways so about a week ago or so I went by Sephora to pick up more of my coverup and of course had to stop by the nail bar!  When did the Sephora X line become so expensive man!! $16 for the nice ones! Jeesh! Anyways I noticed Ciate has a really cute thing where you can pick three minis for $21. And I was soooo tempted because there was a sparkly blue and pink duochrome that I loved, but (does this happen to anyone else??) I literally couldn't find even one more that I liked as much... ughh. So anyways I walked to the till kind of distracted and still thinking on that polish and low and behold there was 2 big containers of Sephora Minis for a dollar each!! Whoop whoop!! All my polish woes melted away!! Dollar polish tends to do that hehehe! SO I shamelessly picked through them, made a huge mess, annoyed a few people trying to pay and found 4 colours I was really excited about! Also its not my fault they put them right in front of the till in a stupid tall vase thingy that was impossible to dig to the bottom in without pulling half of them out! ANWAYS so the next few posts I have are showing you the colours I grabbed!

If your by a Sephora anytime soon I'd definitely stop in a have a look these are nice formula beautiful coloured polishes for dollar store prices!! The first one I have for you is Dangerous! Its a raspberry red with a pink micro shimmer that was a little camera shy, but definitely noticeable in real life in brighter lightings!

Can you kind of see the micro glitter in this shot??

I know this isn't maybe the most interesting colour, but I think its really flattering on me because some reds look too blood red on me and it ends up looking kinda Halloween-y. But the raspberry tone in this one really helps it out a lot.  

Also I've started making pretty collages of swatches, what do you think? Pretty? OR distracting? 

Jellyfish nails!

Hi everyone! I hope you all took yesterday as an excuse to demand cuddles and sweets with your sweetie, or drink some really fancy potent things with some cuddly snuggly blankets and your favourite movie <3

Vancouver Aquarium opened their doors on Wednesday the 12th after hours for some kid-free awesome time and I didn't quite realize how much the children interfere with my enjoyment of the place until the night was over and I realized I learned and talked a lot and actually felt rewarded for my interest... ANYWAY, I was so excited and we all know what I do when I'm excited by now right?

I started with one of my favourite polishes, Nyx Thunder.

I started with it because it is not the easiest polish to work with and does take upwards of 3 coats to be completely opaque, despite the fact that I knew I wanted the darker colour to be near my cuticles. It worked out though! I swiped some Vaseline onto my cuticles to keep them clean and used my make up sponge to make a gradient using Sephora Formula X Cosmic (the one that was a lovely gift!). It's purple after multiple coats but the first coat is blue and I knew it would look like that over another blue.

I love gradients! For some reason it never sticks in my head how good they look and how easy they are. I covered this in a coat of Rainbow Honey Bubblebeam.

Of course it's not over, this isn't art yet! Recently VanAqua advertised their fluorescent jellyfish display and they did not disappoint. My nails needed some jellies! I used acrylic paint and a striper brush I got as part of a set from bornprettystore.com.

I may need a little practice for realism but I really like how they turned out. Hello jellies!

The whole event was absolutely awesome <3 My boyf and I needed a nice date night and we don't really do Valentine's day so this was perfect and fun! Even during the day with little brats running around the actual aquarium is pretty cool. One of the nicest things about the lack of children (even though the lack of children was a gift itself) was that the staff talked about the research that goes on behind the scenes as well as the cool facts about the creatures. I hadn't realized how much Vancouver Aquarium had contributed to science before that night.

Bonus photo!

Awake sloth!!