Doctor Who 50th Anniversary

 SPOILER ALERT!! This post reveals information from the seventh series, if you haven't seen it yet you're reading at your own risk.


The countdown has begun. The 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who is this Saturday (27th November) and myself as well as people around me are gearing up. I will, together with some friends, be watching the episode in 3D in one of the cinemas. How cool?!

To give some space for my excitement, most of Sunday was spent painting my nails with monsters and symbols from the series.A Dalek and Cyberman were given, being some of the more frequently returning villains. Two other familiar faces are The Silence, who appeared in the 5th series as the Doctor and Weeping Angels, most recently known for the last episode with Amy and Rory The Angels Take Manhattan.

When the latest companion, Clara Oswald, appeared, she was sat inside a Dalek. Despite dying then, she returned in the 2012 Christmas Special (and its prequel) as the Doctor is found in Victorian London. The Snowmen, villains of that season, was compared to most of the other monsters significantly easier to do and also fitted in well with the relation to the latest companion. 

On my right pinky, the obligatory bow tie can be found, often worn by the Eleventh Doctor. Bad Wolf is one of the main episodes I remember from Rose's companionship and it will be interesting to see how she now re-appears in the anniversary. The Doctor Who logo had to be included somewhere and on the left thumb you find the Seal of Rassilon, which the Time Lords had on display in places of Great Power.

How are you getting ready for the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary?

Circuit nails

Many, many times have friends shared a circuit board nail design with me, requesting that I replicate it. Not only is it cool, but also related to my degree which means that I've left it until I found something I was happy with. I didn't want to start painting golden lines unless I knew what it actually did, would it be an actual circuit. I finally got around to it, but decided to keep it straightforward. 

On my left hand, I started off with three filters: band-pass, high-pass and low-pass. With the ring finger and pinky not being very big it seemed easier to show diods in parallel/series.

I posted the first picture on facebook and one of the reactions was "Not impressed at all. Needs a Bode plot" (link to Bode Plots). I considered doing that for my right hand, but decided I was too lazy and took an easy way out instead. In the picture you can see the schematic symbol for a capacitor, inductor, resistor and a battery. I decided to spend a little more time for the thumb and made a basic op-amp circuit.

Op-amps and filters are pretty neat, but I've barely touched them since second year. Well, filters are hard to avoid but op-amps easily disappear into bigger "black boxes". However, you should look them up. They are cool.

Social media & operating systems

As you might often notice, I try to get my inspiration for designs for upcoming events or trends. Especially now when I, for some reason, haven't got that much random inspiration the events become even more important and one of the bigger one in my calendar was a hackathon with work.

How do you make a design for a hackathon? The idea of using different logos related to tech has crossed my mind and now seemed like a great time. Said and done, one of the categories at the hackathon was social medial so the left hand nails were decorated with well known logos: facebook, twitter (a very fat twitter bird), reddit, a black&white instagram and Google. Yes, Google was in this case counted to social media. 

The right hand had three easy choices: the Linux penguin, the Windows flag and the Apple apple. I wasn't very keen on breaking the OS trend I had going and it took me a while before I remembered that I could use the Android alien too. Sure, the apple and the little Android-man weren't the best, but that detail on right was easier said then done. For my thumb I opted for Cisco, a hardware company which is mainly known for their routers and switches, or in dummy terms the hardware that the Internet uses.

 Main conclusion from this? If you've got time and patience you can get far in nail art with a toothpick! Yes, it's far from perfect but in most cases you can guess from the context.

XKCD - because we are geeks

Have you ever come across XKCD? It's a brilliant online comic, occasionally (read: often) very geeky, written by the equally brilliant Randall Munroe and goes with the description "A webcomic about romance, sarcasm, math and language." It also has the following warning message: 

this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).

Amongst my uni friends it's commonly used for procrastination or random references and hence something I read regularly. Because it's mainly stick figures I couldn't resist trying it out as a nail design. I only found one other person online who'd tried it, so it was easier to find my own favourites with a bit of help from friends. 

I spent a fair amount of time sketching ideas. This included thinking about what would fit on a nail, which ones could be recognisable to regular readers etc. When asking around, Click And Drag came out as a big favourite, a strip which caused the geeks of the Internet to dance of joy. Because the image is huge, there was a lot to choose from, but most wouldn't be very easy to fit on a nail either in size or detail.

In the end, I opted for the following comics on my right hand: thumb, index, middle, pinky. The man, who I refer to as "hat man", on the ring finger appears often, so I decided not to note which comic this pose was taken from. The computer is admittedly also frequently recurring, but I remember writing that one down since it included more details.

On my left hand I tried including previously mentioned Click and Drag by drawing the balloon-flying character over ring and middle fingers. The pinky was used to type out the comic name, for those who might not recognise it (I was unlikely to forget myself), and on the index finger I went for this one.

On the right thumb, I tried drawing one of these guys but I was a bit too keen when adding the top coat so it smudged. I tried with the velociraptor from this one but would have needed a steadier hand (hence it not being shown).

As base I used Rimmel London's Grey Matter and drew with a nail art pen from Topshop (which unfortunately, after one use, has managed to dry up. It might have been cheapish but I expect more than that from Topshop!) Colour details were done with Sharpies.

I'm really sorry about the rotation, Blogger auto-rotates it for me but doesn't give an option of changing it back.