Lord of the Rings nail art

I went to the West Australian Symphony Orchestra's performance of the music from The Two Towers on the weekend, and wore some Lord of the Rings nail art for the occasion. The orchestra played the soundtrack live on stage while the movie screened, and it was just amazing, although I kept getting caught up in watching the movie and forgetting about the performance!

On my left hand I had the Eye of Sauron, an idea which I borrowed from Chalkboard Nails, and on my right hand I had part of the map of Middle Earth.

For the Eye of Sauron design, I painted my thumb and pinky with Sally Hansen Midnight in NY and my other three fingers with Essence Happy from their 'Snow White' trend edition. I then spread some of the same polish on my thumb and pinky using a small fan brush to begin the "wreathed in flame" effect and continued layering with Rimmel Sun downer, Wet n Wild I red a good book, Rimmel Rapid ruby and Cult Nails Nevermore. I used both a fan brush and also just the polish brushes (with very little polish on them) to get a streaky gradient effect. The actual eye was done with a small nail art brush using Nevermore over a background of Essence Destination sunshine from their 'Ready for boarding' trend edition.

I originally tried stamping for the map design on my right hand, but I couldn't get my stamper to pick up the design from the plate. The stamp was quite detailed and shallow, which might have been the problem, but I also need to practice my stamping technique. Don't you just hate it when you want to be good at something straight away but then it doesn't work like that? Lol. Instead I did a messy background of Nevermore and Ulta3 Creme brulee  streaked over one another to give that 'old parchment' look and then used Lab Muffin's technique of drawing with permanent marker to create the details of the map.

Above are the polishes I used -  sorry for the messy bottles, this was a rather messy process! I also used Essence Peel off base coat for the PVA top coat over the permanent marker, and KBShimmer Clearly on top to top coat everything. The whole look took ages to do, so much so that I was running late and only had 15 minutes to get ready to go out to the concert! Oh well, my nails were done and that's what's important right?

Any other Lord of the Rings fans out there? And has anyone else gone all-out with nail art for a special event before? I'd love to see your blogs/pictures.