NOTD: Jungle Boogie

Hello!

Today my summer challenge was Jungle/Parrots. To honor the theme, I decided to do an abstract-ish version of a jungle in green tones with a vibrant parrot-like-bird-of-paradise-absolutely-not-a-red-Amazonian-chicken bird sitting on the leaf of the accent nail:

It's a parrot. It really is. It is NOT an Amazonian Chicken. Not even a little bit.

This parrot wouldn't vroom if I put four thousand volts through it. 

I used a combination of stamping and freehand to do this. I started with a base of Essence High Spirits and then stamped some leaf-looking like ovals in a very light neutral color. Using those shapes as a rough guide, I painted over them in Wet n Wild Sagreena The Teenage Witch and China Glaze Tree Hugger. I liked the stroke marks that the brush in Sagreena left, so I didn't cover them up, they seemed to make it look a bit more leaf-like to me. I then put teal-green dots in the negative space using a dotting tool and China Glaze's Exotic Encounters.

Then came the chicken, er, parrot. I stamped this using Red Angel plate RA-102 (with Konad Red and Sally Hansen Insta-Dry Lively Lilac), but the top half of the bird did not come out very well. So, I freehanded over it trying to connect the blank spots and even it all out. The part that stamped the worst was the head, which came out as a weird little blob...to help it along I added a beak with Sally Hansen Insta-Dry Lightning, and an eye using Konad black. A tip for the future...when doing freehand nail art, quick-drying polishes and polishes meant for stamping are not the easiest to work with, lol.

I have decided to name my mangy jungle parrot 'Voltie', in honor of the Monty Python Parrot Sketch:

While he's clearly neither Norwegian nor blue, he does look like he might have suffered a similar fate. But he's cute and he has personality and I loves him. :)

Thanks for stopping by, and please check out the other bloggers' creations!

M.