Pika Pika

If you're a nerd like me, then perhaps you'll recognize this design from Dorkly. I have been playing Pokemon games from the very beginning. My first was the Red Version; my dad gave it to me either in '98 or '99...I would have been seven years old. Ever since then, I've made a point to buy at least one game out of each subsequent generation (if not all three cartridges). And what's the most easily recognized Pokemon? Pikachu, of course. A little yellow electric mouse of a pocket monster. I never had any great fondness for the Pokemon in-game myself, but it's easily recognizeable so on the nails it went.

For Pikachu nails, I used clear Avon polish for a base on both hands. Then several, several (I'm talking 5+) coats of this old bottle of Prestige polish I had. Looking at the bottle, I can't actually tell you what shade it is, other than it's a faint gold/yellow color with some sparkles in it. The bottle still has a clearance 0.25$ sticker on it, folks. The Prestige painted on very thinly and very transparently, so it did require a great number of coats to actually appear a vague yellowy color. Then I used a coat of Wet n Wild clear to seal the base.

Now for the details... Because I couldn't locate a really black shade of polish, I used my Sally Hanson Xtreme Wear "Night Lights," this is a very sparkly polish but it has a pretty good dark gray color in addition to the glitter. A couple of solid dots made the eyes, and then I used one corner of the brush to put a smaller dot on the middle fingers and kind of barely nudged the polish out of the dot from the left and right to make an inverted triangle. Trial and error and practice is very much necessary for these things...my right hand actually ended up looking better than my left, even though I paint soooo much better with my right. I double coated the eye dots because the "Night Lights" shade really is too light to be considered black with just one coat. Then after I let them dry for a bit, I ended up getting a Sharpie to draw the mouth. It works better to dot the Sharpie rather than pressing down and drawing a straight line..if you do this it drags the polish and screws up the ink flow in the marker. Finally for Pikachu's rosy cheeks I used a tiny bottle of Bon Bons polish that is a deep magenta with some faint sparkles in it. Just dotted twice for each cheek to make a fat rosy mark, and then covered all the nails with a generous clear coat.