Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Meme Week: Cats (In Spaaaaace)

Of all the challenge days I think I'm the most excited for this one. There are just so many cat memes and each one is better than the last (at least in my opinion). I wanted to paint All The Cats, but I only have five fingers so I had to pick some of my favorites. From thumb to pinkie we have: Nyan Cat, Cheezburger Cat, Grumpy Cat, Hipster Space Cat, and I had to sneak in my own cat, but he doesn't have his own website... yet.
 

The internet is such an awesome place for cats. One minute they can be innocently napping in the hallway and the next they're flying through space.
 
This is my cat Styx 


Space borrowed from this site


I love cats, and cats in space are even better so I started out by painting some galaxy nails. For the cats I tried out the paper decal technique. I re-sized the cats to about 100x100 pixels (this includes some dead space where the background was before I trimmed it off) and printed them out on regular white paper. I cut around the faces and then curled each piece of paper to help it lay closer to the nail. I painted a coat of clear polish one nail at a time and used an orange stick to help press the decal down for several minutes until the polish had hardened. I topped that off with two coats of top coat to seal it all in.
 
A couple technical notes about the paper decals: I think my printer is low on some ink colors so the images weren't that sharp to begin with, but putting the white paper on a dark background also doesn't help. The black started to show through some of the lighter areas once the paper absorbed some of the topcoat. A white background would make this much less noticeable. I wore these about four days before the top coat started wearing thin and the paper got a bit wet when I washed my hands. I think they'd last even longer with reapplication of top coat which I didn't do.


Now that the pesky nails are out of the way let's get to the good stuff: cat videos. These are my top three cat videos of all time. If you haven't seen number one please, please watch it. I promise your entire life will suddenly become complete.
 
1. Oh Long Johnson



2. Boots & Cats
 
 
1. Can't Hug Every Cat
 




4 comments:

  1. I love everything about this. EVERYTHING! (surprise surprise another crazy cat lady lol)

    So cute. Brilliant!

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  2. Love your nails and the accompanying videos :)

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  3. VERY creative mani!!! :D And totally perfect look...how on earth do you guys get the immaculate half-moon, and so close to the cuticle (or eponychium, rather)?!
    Oh, btw, the boots & cats vid is AWESOME! LOLOL I love dubstep. :-D

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    1. Thanks! Anything with cats has to be good right? I have a small stiff bristle paint brush I dip in acetone to clean up around the edges. It works wonders.

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