The arrival of label paper and a little late night tweaking

My day job is as a graveyard supervisor at a 24hrs grocery store. The hours suit my night owl nature and when possible, while on days off, I keep to my standard sleep schedule. Sometimes, like this week, I've had errands that required me to be active during the day so I had to make the switch onto days, by not sleeping after work, and now I've had to make the switch back to nights for work late in the coming night. So this past night I stayed up, occupying myself with some fiddling with photos, labels, and pretty potions. Now that I finally have my label paper, I'll need to start printing my labels, all in due time.

I'm mostly resisting the urge to create new colours as I work towards launch, instead I've been doing some final tweaking formulas and colours I have already largely perfected. Last night I focused on a trio of greens. While I know it is quite common to hear that greens are hard to wear, I happen to have a reasonably dark caucasian skin tone some I find I can wear pretty much any shade. So maybe that's why I am so often drawn to concocting green polishes. Despite this predilection, green is not my favourite colour, or even my second favourite but I probably look best in it so I mix up more greens than I do beautiful blues or purple. That is not to say I haven't a dozen or so shimmers of shades of those colours too.

Having bought the above light box years ago and never really using it, I'm finally getting my very minimal money's worth of the thing. Taken at 2 am, the photo is not perfectly accurate to the shades, the first colour is a deep emerald, the middle is an almost minty turquoise and the final is just a touch greener. Something I need to focus on in the coming weeks in photography. Taking photos of polish, especially polish on my hands is my Achilles heel. I suck at it, honestly. Sadly, the photo below is the best one I have ever taken. Showcasing the above trio, I tried my hand at doing a sponge mani and I used a punch I have from papercrafting to make a stencil for my thumbs. All in all, not bad considering this is the first time I have ever tried to do anything but paint one colour on my nails.

One thing is for certain, my nails need to stop breaking and grow out and I need to practice holding polished in photos. Did you know it is really awkward to take photos left-handed? It happens I am very, very left-handed and my polish application is also that much rougher when done with my right hand. Practice and more practice is called for.

Not that it is a trial to play with all my pretty colours. Good morning/ and goodnight to you all. It's time for me to go to bed.

Colour Me Crazy

I don't really know what to say for this first of, with any luck, many blog post for Painted Bird Lacquer.

Hello? An introduction, perhaps? Seems like the best place to start.

Hi, my name is Robyn, the painted bird of this blog. I make my home split between Maple Ridge and Coquitlam, in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia where I've been making nail polish for my own use for a couple of years now. My start came with an impulse purchase of all things. One of the suppliers I favour for my soapmaking hobby began to sell a nail polish base. When I went to pick up some supplies for my soap, I decided to buy a few mini nail polish bottles and a small bottle of the base. Within a week I was back for a far bigger bottle of the  base and many more nail polish bottles, both mini and large. Sourcing pigments from all over North America became my obsession. Getting that perfect blue, purple, red, became an all encompassing need. After mixing thousands of bottles of polish, many failures and many successes and many surprises later, it's time to let the Painted Bird take flight.

Coming up, I'm going to be opening a poll to let you have your say on what colour lines you would like to see first, after all, I can't well offer everything single formula for sale all at once... I'm insane but not quite mad as a hatter. ;) Here's a sneak peak of my Duel at Dawn, my line of six moody duochromes.