#Gradient Manicure

[gottastim]

leo_nail_2017 on ig

[unprettybutwellpolished]

COOL FOR THE SUMMER ~

Can you tell I'm already ready for summer ? This nail art is calling for summer to be there!

Polishes I used :

Nails Inc. : Walker's Court

Essie : Soles On Fire

OPI : Rosy Future

OPI : Sweet Heart

Maybelline : Sun Kissed

Revlon : Up In Charms

Sinful Colors : Beaches And Cream

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[simplymadewishes]

[nailsandinspo]

[tdesignersblog]

[baphofemme]

attempted a lisa frank color scheme on my left hand 🦄🌈

[m-everhamnails]

07/06/2024

💚Mooncat

Weeping Willow

Tyrannosaurus Hex

My Bugs! My Bugs!

Hardcore Buttercup

[wordswithloveee]

[tabascodrinker]

Did my nails for Valentine’s Day ❤️

[pelcas-beauty]

Pink and white glitter gradient nail art design

[elliespuns]

Bet Sarah had her nails phase, and she always convinced Joel to let her do his nails. And he'd rock it, alright. He'd show up to the construction site with purple nail polish, maybe with a star pattern on a single nail as well. And whoever criticized it or looked at him weird got an earful from him because 1) his babygirl did an amazing job and 2) he ain't got the patience for that toxic masculinity bullshit when he's so busy modeling his purple nails that match Sarah's.

You know, I bet Sarah wasn't just giving Joel manicures, she was weaponizing cuteness. Like, imagine some hardened construction worker giving Joel the side-eye for his sparkly pinky, and Joel just fixes him with the dad glare. Then, deadpan, he says "My daughter spent three hours on this glitter gradient. You got a problem with my artistic expression?" and the poor guy just wilts.

[bxtxnx]

[♋︎ + ♍︎ + ♎︎ + ♓︎] soft blue.

Cancer, Virgo, Libra and Pisces (Sun/Venus/Rising) look great with soft blue nails.

Cancer can keep their nails in just a solid color or play around and add some glitter to their nails.

Virgo should keep their nails in a solid color, do a very minimalistic design or use this color for a french manicure.

Libra can try out a design with some hearts on the nails or a gradient.

Pisces can go for any type of design with this color. ☽

[unprettybutwellpolished]

TWENTY-NINE!!! *Schmidt's voice* ~

I feel like each age I reach is unbelievable like what do you mean I'm 29 ??? This is the last year with a 2 a the beginning of my age like wtf lol.

For this nail art, I did the same design than for my 28th birthday. I really like this one so I decided to redo it.

Polishes I used :

Essie : Groove Is In The Heart

OPI : Charge It To Their Room

OPI : Silicon Valley Girl

OPI : Clear Your Cash

OPI : Blinded By The Ring Light

Nails Inc. : Royal Mint Street

Nails Inc. : Poets Road

Maybelline : Uptown Blue

Holo Taco : Linear Holo Taco

White & Black Polishes

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[the-invisibility-bloke]

harry/draco | 450 words

October 2001

You find him before you realise you’re looking. That’s what you do, isn’t it?

“Suppose this is where you ask what I’m doing out here all by my lonesome.”

He spits it out like bitter tea, but he’s wrong. You don’t have to ask. Just like he didn’t have to turn around to know it was you. You think too loudly, he’s accused on more than one occasion, cushioned by a twitch of thin, pink lips.

Chilled travertine clips under your feet. You join him at the balustrade and parallel his posture, an existential wilt over the terrace railing, stare out at the manor’s spread of manicured topiaries. Shapeless demons in the dark. Bit too close to home.

“Reckoned you needed some air.”

“Bludger to the head is what I need.”

You smile. “Keep drinking, you’ll get there.”

He huffs. You haven’t seen a single bottle in his hand all night.

“Cold feet?” you ask.

“That would imply they were, at some point, warm.”

And because you’re you, heedless and out of time, you ask point blank, “Do you love her?”

His laugh runs colder, sharper, than the stone beneath your feet. “Is this what we do now? Bare our fucking souls?”

“Why not?”

“Because it doesn’t bloody change anything!”

It could, you nearly say, but he’s looking at you like he already knows. May as well lay your last card down.

“You don’t have to do it.”

“Jesus Christ, Potter.”

“Just figured I’d say it in case you needed to hear it.”

“Are you genuinely that arrogant? Standing here at my fucking stag do, telling me I don’t have to marry?”

“Yes.”

Chips down, shields up. “Got a better offer, then?”

Fire and ice go head to head in the tempest grey of his eyes, somewhere on the gradient between ash and permafrost, and all you want in the whole damn world is to thaw him out, ignite him from the embers. It’s there in his eyes, all of it, playing out like the flash of your life before you die, and you’d know: Three years’ worth of baby steps, shaky and uncertain. Hatred cooled to civility, civility to friendship. Every accidental touch, heating into the ones you stopped pretending were accidents. The growth of glances from fleeting to longing. The first time he called you Harry, then backtracked like he was burned.

Burn with me.

Your hand’s so close to his on the railing, you could stretch out your pinkie and touch him. Just once, just that, and he’d know.

“Draco.”

Lithe fingers climb over yours, cold, hot, quivering. They make it all the way up to your cheek by the time he says, “We can’t.”

-

[an angsty standalone from the last chapter of this hot mess]

[mother2monsters]

Serendipity in Seoul pt. 31

Flashback to the day they arrived in Seoul:

The sun was warm against their skin as Destiny and Lyric stepped into the sleek, modern nail salon, a quiet buzz of conversation filling the air. It was a ritual—getting their nails done before a BTS concert, hyping themselves up for the nights ahead.

Lyric had gone all out, as expected. Her nails were painted in an intricate gradient of fiery oranges and deep reds, perfectly matching the aesthetic of Hoseok’s concert colors, tiny sparkling gems accentuating the edges.

Destiny, on the other hand, kept it simple. A glossy black base, each nail decorated with the names Namjoon, Yoongi, Taehyung, Jungkook, and the BTS symbol on her thumb. It was personal. It was hers.

The salon wasn’t packed, but there were a few other customers—women who, at first glance, seemed just like them. BTS fans, giggling excitedly, wearing shirts with album logos and concert dates printed on them.

Destiny didn’t think twice about them.

Not until she heard the whispering.

Not until she understood it.

“They must be American. Black, obviously.”

“Yeah. And fat. Seriously, why do they even bother?”

Destiny’s fingers twitched against her lap.

“BTS would never want them. What a joke. Imagine thinking they have a chance.”

A sharp, bubbling anger started in her chest. She didn’t react—not yet. But she knew Lyric heard it too. Her best friend’s posture had gone rigid, the playful ease she had just moments ago vanishing in an instant.

The women kept going.

“They should be embarrassed. They’re the reason international fans are ruining everything.”

That was it.

Lyric snapped.

She turned, eyes dark with fury, voice ice-cold as she spoke—flawless Korean rolling off her tongue like a goddamn whip.

“You do realize we understand every single word you’re saying, right?”

Dead silence.

The women froze, eyes going wide, mouths parting in shock.

Destiny didn’t wait for them to recover.

She leaned back in her chair, crossing one leg over the other, a slow smirk curling at the corner of her lips as she eyed them like they were nothing.

“BTS would never want us? That’s funny.” Her voice dripped with mock amusement. “Because they don’t fucking want you either.”

The women stammered, flustered, tripping over half-baked apologies, but Destiny wasn’t interested.

She turned back to her nail tech, casually glancing at her half-finished manicure.

“Make sure the names are extra bold. Wouldn’t want anyone to miss them.”

Lyric snorted.

The women got up and left.

[magnoliaroad]

4 Seasons Back Yard Remodel + Crystal Yard

My 4 seasons remodels of the Petz 5 Back Yard are now available for download! And because I went on a bit of a side-quest, I’ve also made a bonus version, a fantasy, crystal back yard!

You can read my creator's notes below:

I somewhat wonder if it's fair to criticize the original Petz 5 playscenes too harshly. It's possible that the development team faced tight deadlines or budget constraints, factors that may not have been entirely within their control. However, regardless of the circumstances, the end result was a disappointingly sloppy product, and it's difficult to ignore some of the glaring flaws. While I can understand that the developers were working with dated software, there are certain flaws that can't be attributed to software limitations. Rather, they seem to reflect a clear lack of attention to detail. Here's what I mean.

The more you look at it, the harder it is to decide which flaw is the worst. The blatant MS paint spray paint "touch-up" in the upper left, that there was no effort put into blending in the skybox, or that they neglected to add textures to the roof.

Alright, enough ranting there. None of this is to say my playscenes are perfect either, but they were a labor of love and I hope that this is evident in the final results.

SPRING

I smoothed out the grass texture to give it a more velvety, manicured lawn appearance. I brightened up the dingy looking fence to a more brighter white. The original playscene had a hole in the fence, and while it might add "character", I opted to cover over it for a more polished look. I added bushes behind the fence to cover up the skybox and to conceal the bottom of the houses.

Speaking of houses. Wow these needed a big work-up. The texture work (or lack of) on these is just bad. I'm no expert in house construction, but even mostly-brick houses will have some accents like trims to break up the monotony of a fully-brick façade.

Because of how fuzzy the brick texture is in the original, I drew in the mortar lines of the bricks to enhance the texture. I added roof shingles, siding, and trim boards to the house to make it look more like a typical suburban house. Despite these edits, it's still not a "great" house - the way it looks through the windows, it looks like the house is one room lol. I wish I could put better houses in the backdrop but because Tinker doesn't allow me to edit the animated blinds, I'm constrained to keeping them the shape that they are. Oh well. We can use our imagination.

I added landscaping rocks to make the flower bed look nicer. I also added some landscaping details like bushes, garden lights, and string lights for ambiance.

[ Enlarged picture of the garden light I made ]

I also worked to improve the skyboxes in all 4 seasons of the of the Back Yard playscenes. It would be lengthy to get into the details of all that but here's a before and after of the night skybox. You got to love them high-quality MS paint stars in the original.

SUMMER

I had a hard time with the summer one because it was hard to come up with ways to make it look different from the spring version. I did make the grass, bushes, and tree leaves slightly more vibrant. Originally I had some flowers by the bushes but I just wasn't really happy with them. At the last minute, I made the decision to remove them entirely. This makes the playscene a little more "plain" but I think some people may want a more "plain", undecorated version so that they can dress it up how they want with toyz.

FALL

Fall is my favorite season, so this was a joy to make. I toned down the color of the grass and added fall landscaping motifs. Recoloring the tree's leaves was done by using Photoshop's gradient map feature. If time permits, I may do a tutorial on this in the future.

Gradient mapping is a powerful tool for recoloring almost anything. It can give way better results than methods such as hue/saturation, replace color, etc. And thanks to photoshop actions, applying this recolor to all the animation frames took just a couple of minutes.

Unfortunately, the fall leaves look "bright" in the nighttime version of the playscene. There does not seem to be a way to implement a darker version of these leaves for the nighttime playscene. If you look at the sprites in Tinker, you'll see that there are two sets of animations for Leaves A, B, and C and they're labeled "PropsAd" and "PropsAn", which would lead you to think that the developers originally intended for there to be a set of leaves for the day time, and a darker set for the night time. I guess the developers scrapped this idea because this does not work in the actual gameplay. When I experimented with this, the game appears to randomly display the nighttime sprite even during the day time, effectively ruining the intended affect. I'm not sure why the developers scrapped this. Either they had issues coding this properly or were just didn't want to put in the effort to make two sets of leaves.

WINTER

Instead of doing recolored leaves for this scene, I made all the leaves transparent and added holiday lighting to the tree. I know the lights aren't perfect - it was kind of hard to make out which direction a branch was going, so it has hard to maintain 'perfect' perspective.

CRYSTAL YARD

This is a bonus playscene that I made because I got a little side-tracked as I was working on the 4 seasons back yards. This is inspired by the Suramar zone from World of Warcraft, so it has a bit of that fantasy, night-elf feel and color scheme. It's been years since I've played WoW but I still appreciate the enchanting aesthetic of the elven zones.

I used gradient mapping again to recolor the leaves to give it this lavender, shimmery, iridescent look. I did a little bit of gaussian blurring and layer effects to make them look a little more "glowy" than the originals.

As before, Tinker won't let me edit the blinds, so it limited what edits I could do to the houses. I would love it if I could have done curtains instead or something. I did my best to make these houses look a little less suburban and more elven. It's not perfect but it was rough working with what I had.

KNOWN ISSUES / THINGS I COULDN'T EDIT

As far as I'm aware, there is no way to turn off the snow effect for seasons like summer where it wouldn't make sense. This probably involves some code-editing that is beyond my technical skillset.

The winter playscene still has the green grass footprint when your petz walk. The sprites for these are not housed within the .env itself but in the Petz 5 Rez.dll file. It would probably involve a bit of tweaking in the code to switch the sprites to something else.

The fall leaves are "bright" in the night time version because there is no way to implement a second, darker set of leaves.

I cannot edit the blinds animation. Tinker gives you an error when you try to edit this sprite. This unfortunately limits what edits I can make to the house and the fence because of where the sprite is positioned.

If anyone does know of solutions to these, do let me know as I'd love to enhance these scenes further!

ICONS

Making the icons for these was also a fun little project. For some odd reason though, the game puts a stray pixel over them when I import them through LnzPro. I did my best to disguise them but there does not seem to be a way to fix that.

BEFORE / AFTER

With all that rambling out of the way, visit my main page over at Magnolia Road > Resources > Playscenes to download the goodies!