Artsy Wednesday: Inspired by a book

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Theme: Inspired by a book

I’m a nerd, and part of my duties as a nerd is to be a bookworm, so it was quite a task to work out my favourite books, and figure out how to present one visually (if anyone knows a way to depict Ulysses on their nails, please share).

I settled on a nerd classic: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. H2G2 was one of the books I reread the most when I was in high school. And I still wouldn’t recognise half of the minor characters! It’s full of tangents and side notes, and is so bellyachingly clever and funny.

In high school (and some of university) I faithfully carried a towel around on Towel Day, until I realised it might’ve been interfering with my social life. (And yet, I never managed to pick up a cute nerd boy. How does that work?? 🙁 ) It was turned into a movie later, narrated by Stephen Fry and starring Martin Freeman, Mos Def and Zooey Deschanel (synchronised nerdgasm NOW).

The non-freehanded nails are a sort-of repeat of my earlier outer space nail design (view here).

This mani was based on one of my favourite passages:

Another thing that got forgotten was the fact that against all probability a sperm whale had suddenly been called into existence several miles above the surface of an alien planet.

And since this is not a naturally tenable position for a whale, this poor innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity as a whale before it then had to come to terms with not being a whale any more.

This is a complete record of its thoughts from the moment it began its life till the moment it ended it.

Ah … ! What’s happening? it thought.

Er, excuse me, who am I?

Hello?

Why am I here? What’s my purpose in life?

What do I mean by who am I?

Calm down, get a grip now … oh! this is an interesting sensation, what is it? It’s a sort of … yawning, tingling sensation in my … my … well I suppose I’d better start finding names for things if I want to make any headway in what for the sake of what I shall call an argument I shall call the world, so let’s call it my stomach.

Good. Ooooh, it’s getting quite strong. And hey, what’s about this whistling roaring sound going past what I’m suddenly going to call my head? Perhaps I can call that … wind! Is that a good name? It’ll do … perhaps I can find a better name for it later when I’ve found out what it’s for. It must be something very important because there certainly seems to be a hell of a lot of it. Hey! What’s this thing? This … let’s call it a tail – yeah, tail. Hey! I can can really thrash it about pretty good can’t I? Wow! Wow! That feels great! Doesn’t seem to achieve very much but I’ll probably find out what it’s for later on. Now – have I built up any coherent picture of things yet?

No.

Never mind, hey, this is really exciting, so much to find out about, so much to look forward to, I’m quite dizzy with anticipation …

Or is it the wind?

There really is a lot of that now isn’t it?

And wow! Hey! What’s this thing suddenly coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like … ow … ound … round … ground! That’s it! That’s a good name – ground!

I wonder if it will be friends with me?

And the rest, after a sudden wet thud, was silence.

Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the universe than we do now.

For this mani, I used China Glaze Some Like It Haute over ulta3 Wild Berry, then added ulta3 Wild flakies on most of my nails. Then I freehanded a whale and a pot of petunias using a bunch of different cremes, most of which were frankens so I’m not going to try listing them all.

Check out these other Artsy Wednesday blogs for more book-inspired manis: