Dear Mr. Salten

When I was just a little scrubby kid, I saw my first animated movie: Bambi.

I still am entranced. The animation surpasses anything Disney can now jack out on a whizzwang computer with three dimensional tracking shots. This was hand painted on layers of glass by artists who had spent months studying the movement of deer by using fawns for life drawing.

The music was so amazing that I think I wore the record out. I mean OUT. It was a deep sapphire blue album with a faux curtain styling that opened up and there were beautiful drawings, a book, and I was in ecstasy. 

Of course I read the book by Felix Salten, which had a much darker, more mortal motif. Chapters with things like the death of a leaf, the chasing of animals by hounds, impressed upon me that I was no hunter, that's for sure.

In the meantime, I still have the book and have read all of Felix Salten's books (the one on the Lippizzaner's is a "sad and beautiful thing" to quote Roberto Benigni's character in Down by Law).

Back to nail polish....right?

My homage to Bambi and the Great Prince of the Forest

This was taken with my iPhone.

Base layer is a Borghese white that I'm using right now. It's pretty dense, will need a thinning, but if you see one around at a discount house, you might want to grab it, the coverage is very nice.

I then stamped an old BM plate that had pointy leaved flowers. they look like leaves for two reasons: I layered a ton of stamping and I found that my stamp didn't lay down everything. The latter is an ongoing issue, and I am not sure what I'm doing wrong, but it worked out here. It feels like a forest. I guess I could have done a gradient, but this was all very spur of the moment.

Stamping polishes:  Cocoa Bean by Maybelline (blogged here) and Max Factor Momentum Moss (blogged here)

Finally I took a teeny tiny brush that I purchased many years ago and worked with taupe (Cocoa Bean), black, and white, to create deer-like shapes. 

Stepping back I'm glad I came up with something that looked like it did, and I fully am awstruck by bloggers like The Daily Nail and other nail art bloggers. This is on my right hand because I'm a lefty and it really was much harder than I thought. So many kudos to nail art bloggers!

Still, I was in the mood to make the homage because I guess when you create something in any form of media, you honor your influences.

Thanks for reading my little nail polish journal!