Sunday, February 21, 2016

EXO PLANET #2 The EXO'luXion

If you've been keeping up with me on Instagram for the past few weeks then you probably already know that I took a trip out to Vancouver over reading week! One of the main reasons I decided to go out West was to be able to go to the Vancouver stop during the North American leg of exo's EXO'luXion tour! Obviously my nails needed to be done in exo-style for the concert because I mean, common, I have a reputation to live up to, don't I? :P

For the first half of this post I'll be talking about the design as usual, but for the second half I'll be talking a bit about my concert experience! (There will be an obvious switch between the two parts so don't worry about it if you aren't interested in reading any in-depth concert info :P) 







It was a little weird doing a kpop design and not having a specific song to base it off of. I felt a bit like I was going in blind and ended up just googling exoluxion to get some inspiration.

After considering the option of trying to paint a sea of fans and lightsticks on my nails (which sounded great in my head but would have been hard to translate into an actual design), I found my final inspiration: exo's baseball jackets.



I really like the style of the jackets and lbr, it's very hard to go wrong with a black and white design.

I feel like this design is kind of a a marriage of my Love Me Right and Call Me Baby designs; it's got the sporty, jersey-like design which was in LMR and it's got the same sleek feeling and colour combination as CMB.

As you can see, I didn't use the numbers that were actually on the baseball jacket for the design. Instead I decided to use Kai's jersey number, 88, as he's my exo (and ultimate) bias. Using 88 in the design also meant that my nails would match the sweater I was wearing to the concert; after 3 years I finally got around to ordering a Kai version exo SBS Gayo Daejun sweater (I've literally wanted one of those since I saw that year end stage).


Wrong side so you can't see Kai's number, but trust me on this



Since the tutorials for my exo designs seem to be doing the best on my Youtube channel I obviously had to film a tutorial for this design as well. And let me tell you, this was probably the most annoying tutorial I've ever filmed. The design isn't even that difficult, but I kept messing up the 8 and making it either too big or too small or too messy. And then when I decided to settle on one take, the film ended up being too dark to use. In all, I filmed this tutorial 5 times before finally getting a decent take (thank God the editing went smoothly or I may have had a breakdown lol). If you recreate this design don't forget to credit me and tag your version with #looknyanails on IG and Tumblr so I can see!



If the way I painted the number in the video tutorial seems a little messy/unclear, I created an alternate pictorial that I think should be easier to follow.




Enjoy!

Products Used:
Essie - Grow Stronger Base Coat
Essie - Licorice
HK Girl - Clear Top Coat
Sally Hansen White On
Vinyls: Stripes Skinnies from TwinkledT.com.

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Ok! Now that I've talked in-depth about my nails I'm going to move on to talk a bit about the concert in general.
As I mentioned before, I went to the the Vancouver stop of the tour. Even though both the Chicago and New York stops would have been closer to me (I'm from the Toronto area) I thought it would be more fun to go to Van since that meant I'd be able to go to the concert with my friend! Thankfully the concert dates were all around reading week so the travel didn't interfere with classes too much.

The concert was at UBC so my friend and I picked up the merch I ordered earlier in the day to avoid a line up and then spent a few hours just touring the university campus (which is gorgeous btw, why didn't I apply there when I was choosing universities??). Since the concert was supposed to start at 7:30 the doors were supposed to open at 6. When we got back to the arena at 6 though there was a "long" (or so we thought at the time) line up already for the seated section and I'm pretty sure we only moved forward about 10ft in an hour. I say "long" because by the time 7 rolled around and my friend went to see if she could find the back of the line it turned out that we were actually relatively close to the front. The line up went down the street about 3 blocks and then turned - we never did end up finding the end of the line because it was just too far back. It was a bit of a long wait for the line to start moving but honestly I was just happy it wasn't raining (or negative 30 degrees Celsius like it apparently was back in Ontario).

When we finally got into the stadium we headed straight for our seats (we skipped concession because honestly, who's gonna pay $7 for a cooler? Not me, obviously). We ended up with really good seats in my opinion - we were in row 9 of the closest seated section to the stage - and while we were waiting for all the other fans to be seated or let into GA I was obviously taking pictures of my nails (and the venue itself).



The next picture of the arena is from when we basically just sat down so a lot of people were still coming in. Look at that GA tho. So many people squished into such a small space. I don't know if GA was sold out or not, but from where I was sitting by the time the concert started it looked like GA was only half full because of how crowded it was up at the front. The people at the back of GA looked like they were having fun tho, they had a ridiculous amount of room to dance and jump around lol.


This is basically the only clear picture I got of any member and it was during the opening VCR lol. I only had my phone with me so all of the pictures I have of the actual members (not of the screen) are crappy, digital-zoom cell phone quality at best.



It was probably right after this VCR that the first surge happened in GA. I was paying attention to the stage so I didn't see it happen, but when my friend pointed it out to me she said it was like you could just see movement and then people toppling over until there was like a dent in the crowd where people had fallen down. I could see people helping other fans up but man, am I glad we decided to buy seated instead of GA.

Playboy has arguably the best outfits and choreo so obviously that performance deserved a picture.



That panorama tho.
This shot makes GA look a lot more full and spread out than it actually was, but it looks cool nonetheless. This was during one of exo's ments, and there's a good chance it was one of the times that the members (usually Chanyeol) were asking fans in GA to take a few steps back. This happened multiple times and basically just reinforced how glad I was that my friend convinced me that seated tickets were the way to go. From what I heard there were a lot of injuries in GA and I saw them carry out at least one girl.







Other than the drama in GA though, the concert was super fun and I'm honestly so glad that I went! It was definitely worth it to fly all the way to Vancouver, especially because I got to hang out and tour around the city for a week after!
So basically tl;dr: awesome concert, awesome trip!

Sorry for this being such a long post, but if you made it through reading all of that I honestly commend you :P

I'll be back to my regularly scheduled nail designs in the next few days! ^^

xo,
Becca.

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