Guilty Pleasures

I have had DebZ's "Joy" book in hand for the past two months...what to, what to do. The topic was so broad, I found it hard to focus in on a particular idea for her book. There were a few things that helped me come up with the idea for this spread. First, I began to think more "Guilty Pleasures" than "Joy." Then when I looked that the pages that followed the last spread in her book--the ones available for me to work on--I saw a two-page spread decorated with illustrations of hands. This got me thinking about how one of my guilty pleasures is to treat myself to a new nail polish color :-)

I haven't counted how many bottles of nail polish I own (it's a lot). I use some for my artwork--especially the colors with glitter. It's like glitter paint with its very own brush! Most of my polishes, however, are deep, luscious and deliciously dark colors. No pastels here!

Now about this spread. For the background, I decided to type up a list (comprehensive, but by no means complete) of OPI nail polish names. They are clever, like a play on words (MAC make-up and Ben & Jerry ice cream names are pretty entertaining too). Once I had the list of names, I ran it off on two pages of vellum and used that for my background. The transparency of the vellum allowed the hand illustrations already on the page to show through.

Then, I used a picture of a hand with clear polish (from the OPI website) and a mirror image copy of it to create the two hands you see on the page. This pair of hands served as the template for the nail polish colors. I then took transparencies created three overlays per side. One overlay is taped to the top side of the page, one to the side of the page and the third to the bottom of the page. I took the first overlay and painted each nail a different color and repeated this process for the remaining overlays. In all, I had a total of 30 nail polish colors on the 6 overlays.

And to finish it off (cuz it just wouldn't be me without this), I added some bling by giving each overlay a piece of jewelry. Two of the overlays have rings and the remaining overlays have bracelets. Fun spread!