Alice, What Have You Done?

Mr. Finger Candy likes to joke that my taste in video games is completely schitzoid – it’s either totally family-friendly, G-rated fare (currently working my way through the PS4 reissue of the Lego Harry Potter series) or it’s a blood-soaked, LSD-fueled descent into Victorian era madness (I’m awaiting 2017’s release of We Happy Few, a gorgeous, Bioshock-ish game about a filthy, dystopian version of 1960s London where everybody pops a super mood-enhancing drug called Joy to distract them from all the real activities going on in dirty, dystopian London, which would be mind control and slaughter.  Good times!)

2011’s Alice: Madness Returns, a favourite of mine – indeed, I launched this blog with nothing but those first rough Alice designs – falls squarely into the latter category.  It’s beyond messed up – rough subject matter, abject cruelty, nasty blood and gore.  Cripes, why would I play such a thing?  Well, I haven’t, not since I platinumed it back in 2011 (yes, I just used “platinum” as a verb.)  But Alice ranks as a favourite simply by virtue of its beauty; it’s the most gorgeous video game I’ve ever seen, filled to the brim with mesmerizing visuals.  Sometimes I’d just park Alice on a cliff and randomly swing the camera around, taking in every inch of the sick (in every sense of the word) artwork.

Getting down to these inspired-by nails, our girl Alice wears black and white striped tights.  And since American McGee’s version of Alice can’t seem to take two steps without running something through with her Vorpal Blade, I added a bit of blood spatter.  Finally, when Alice needs to take giant leaps across immense chasms, she busts out this nifty little double-hopping float that (usually) lands her gracefully on the other side. The best part of that move (aside from the physicslessness of it all) is that when she hops, she’s swept up in this pretty little tornado of blue, black and white butterflies that guide her safely to the other side.  So I added some of those boosting butterflies – can’t be too careful when you’re running (floating) through Wonderland hacking and slashing. 😉

Rip My Heart Out: A Then and Now Post

And now for a very different sort of Valentine’s Day manicure!  Years ago I was completely enamored with a video game called Alice: Madness Returns.  It was a very NSFW, possibly NSFL (Not Safe For Life), retelling of Alice in Wonderland, if Lewis Carroll’s beloved tale were chockablock with mutant baby dolls, Victorian era sanitariums and monsters who look like they were pulled apart and stitched back together again with pieces of other monsters.

My favourite thing about the game was Alice’s wardrobe, which leaned heavily towards the Gothic Lolita and was wonderfully, blessedly free of the all-tits-and-ass style favoured by other video game heroines.  Alice had something like 12 different costumes, including six downloadable-only outfits that gave her special powers, as all great outfits do.  Perk-wise, my favourite was the Caterpillar dress, which enabled Alice to shrink down to itty bitty insect size to creep through tiny keyholes.  But for my visual money, I always chose the original meat dress, Alice’s Fleshmaiden costume, an outfit that really looked like those inside-out monsters I was mentioning earlier.  Power-wise, the Fleshmaiden costume (ugh, that name, though) enabled Alice to slip effortlessly into Hysteria mode, a kind of abstract, black and white (and red) world that looked like that metallic taste you get in your mouth when you’re so angry, you kind of lose your hearing.  If the DLC items could be said to belong to any given level, the Fleshmaiden costume was the domain of Queensland, a meat and tendon and blood-soaked hellscape ruled by the Queen of Hearts.

My for-a-time obsession with Madness Returns happened to coincide with the earliest days of my all-the-time obsession with nail art, and indeed, I launched this very blog with those initial hesitant attempts.  So it felt quite fitting to revisit one of those designs for this Then and Now post that really puts the “anti” in anti-Valentine’s Day.  Anyhow, happy day to you, friends, no matter how you choose to acknowledge the day (although hopefully it doesn’t involve wearing your enemy’s heart on your lapel like a brooch.)

Silk Maiden: A Then and Now Post

Just in case you’re wondering exactly how random (and multi-sided) my thought processes can be, here’s how these nails, a “reboot” of the first manicure I ever shared on this blog, came into existence:

1. Week four’s theme in April’s N.A.I.L. Challenge is Spring flowers. I like roses; I should do roses.

2. Ooh, remember those roses you did waaaaaaaaayyyyy back when in that mess of Alice: Madness Returns manis you were doing?

3. That game was awesome. I wish Crazy Horse would come out with another one.

4. Anyhow, you could try those roses again. That Silk Maiden dress Alice wears in the Mysterious East level is such a beautiful design, and I’m sure you’ve improved enough to do the things you were scared to even attempt last time.

5. Ooh, Snickers!

6. Try to concentrate. Anyways, why stop at the print on Alice’s silk dress? We could also add the design on her apron, and the bow at the back of her obi with the odd little shrunken head at its centre!

7. Oh, it’s “we” now, is it? Except that’s veering a tad astray from the Spring flowers prompt, is it not?

8. Sure, but three fingers’ worth of Alice’s navy blue Chinoiserie-inspired gown is better than none. Plus look at that adorable little green shrunken head!

9. You had me at “shrunken head.”

And scene!

This really was the first manicure I posted to this blog, at the beginning of August 2013. I had taken up nail art as a rather intensive hobby some months prior, but had no outlet for it other than pestering my friends on Facebook with an endless series of photos of my ultra wonky first efforts. So instead of driving them (further) insane, I started this blog, and these were the first nails I felt comfortable enough to share with the greater world. Encouragingly, it would appear as though lots of little things about my technique have improved (to say nothing of my iPhotography and layout skills.)

Hattress: A Then and Now Post

At the end of September 2013 just as I was really starting to get into nail art and blogging, I assigned myself a week-long mini challenge in which I did a manicure representing every dress worn by Alice in the beautiful, but exceptionally demented, video game Alice: Madness Returns. I had just platinumed the game (yes, I used “platinum” as a verb – it means I got all the trophies or completed everything in the game there was to complete or, alternately, explored every backwards-facing, viscera-covered nook and cranny and indiscriminately laid waste to an entire Wonderland of enslaved nightmare creatures with an assortment of weaponry last put into use at the Tower of London) and Alice’s at times vibrant, at more times blood-soaked world seemed like a natural fit. Girlfriend’s got a wardrobe, too, in addition to a Vorpal Blade, so it was a nice little fait accompli.

One of Alice’s outfits I tackled was a downloadable only costume called The Hattress. Modelled after the bondage gear-meets-straight jacket suit the Mad Hatter wears in Madness Returns, it features odd little Steampunk touches (actually, when Alice wears this costume, the irises of her eyes change into spinning, copper-coloured cogs), sickly green tights and an improbably large, black and white checked top hat bearing the symbol for Mercury, or the element that put the Mad in the Hatter.

I remember really liking these nails at the time and thinking that they represented a nice turning point in my work, particularly the checkerboard pattern of the Hattress’ hat, but being so new to the nail art game, I always knew I could do better. So it’s fortunate that I’ve had the chance to do just that with this updated mani that takes elements of that first design and tidies them up a bit. The change isn’t too dramatic, which is nice in and of itself – it means I couldn’t have gotten it too wrong the first time around – but everything just looks so much tidier and more deliberate. The difference a year and change of practice makes, right?

Disney Girl Challenge: The Queen of Hearts

Given the rash of Alice: Madness Returns-inspired nails I did last year and a couple of other Alice-centric designs kicking around my archives, you might reasonably assume that I love Alice in Wonderland. And yet, I don’t. For me it’s the literary equivalent of fresh marshmallows and things involving roasted garlic – I far prefer the idea of it as opposed to, you know, IT. And while there have been innumerable interpretations of Lewis Carroll’s acid trip of a master work, ensuring that fans of the concept can always find a Wonderland to suit their tastes, the source material from which they derive is so distractingly scattershot and unformed, I have a hard time wading through the crazy. It’s like listening to a pervy junkie reminisce about the good old days when you could keep the private company of seven-year-old girls without their parents getting all uptight about it (until, you know, their parents get all uptight about it; as I learned in a children’s lit class I took in university, Carroll’s friendship with a very young Alice Liddell, the real life inspiration for our heroine in Wonderland, ended rather abruptly after her parents became concerned that his intentions towards their daughter were not entirely honourable. And if you’re thinking, “Well, yeah, nothing about this situation sounds remotely honourable or on the level,” keep in mind that at the time – the mid-1860s – grown men keeping the company of children as friends was not entirely uncommon, nor was it regarded as all that weird. Until, like I said, someone went and made it weird.)

It has been left to literary history to decide whether Carroll behaved inappropriately with Alice, but what can’t be debated is the final outcome after her parents removed her from his life, which is of course the book itself, a kind of fever dream ode to one man’s descent into drug-induced insanity after his favourite playmate was taken away. It’s not even particularly well written. But giant, hookah-smoking caterpillars! And, um, backwards-talking drug addicts all hopped up on caffeine and hat glue. It’s, like, seriously, dude, PUT. DOWN. THE. OPIUM.

All that to say these nails are based on yet another interpretation of Alice in Wonderland, this time the animated Disney movie of 1951 and its decapitation-loving Queen of Hearts.

Alice Challenge: Checkmate

Finally, leaving not the best for last, but rather the one I was the least enthused to tackle, we have Alice’s Checkmate dress. I wound up liking these a lot more than I had anticipated, thanks in large part to the red I used, Essence Fame Fatal, which is a super one-coater that won’t break the bank, with really juicy colour to boot.

Still, I felt like I was kind of just recreating the cover art of Breaking Dawn here, which…no.

Alice Challenge: Caterpillar

Alice’s downloadable Caterpillar dress is the closest this game ever gets to cute. It’s kind of adorable, as is she when she utilizes this costume’s “super power” of unlimited shrink size (comes in handy both when dodging bloodthirsty psychological beasts and when crawling through keyholes.)

Alice Challenge: Cheshire

I did these nails around the same time I discovered that I’m not altogether untalented at water marbling (although we shall not speak of the clean-up involved, as we all know it’s horrendous.)

But I thought water marbling would work for the Cat’s markings, and indeed, it did, along with some very unsettling glow in the dark eyes.

Alice Challenge: Hattress

Alice gets in touch with her inner steampunk.

Alice Challenge: Late But Lucky

I’m late, I’m late, for a very impor — you know how the rest goes. 😉