Improved Outfits [2]: Color Coordination - 2 colors

 So in this post I want to talk a bit about how to put together outfits with two colors. Using the base color of the dress and a color picked from the colors in the print. To balance this type of color coordinate its often good to have shoes in the base color so that you then can wear socks in the accent color to get contrast from the shoes. If the socks or tights are the same color as the dress you end up lumping together the same color and it looks unbalanced. The socks being another color gives a space between the shoes and dress. The blouse will be in the accent color to again be contrasting the dress. most of the accessories too since we already have so much of the base color from the dress itself. wristcuffs in the base color can help break off again after the sleeves and you will probably want either a headbow, some additional bow in your hair, or have your hair be in the base color. Just so You get something of that color in the top section.

The Fantastic Horoscope outfit will look very different from the one with Horror Candy Shop. But since both dresses have the same accent colors in the print you can put together the outfit in the exact same way! Coordinating with the accent colors from a print will really make the colors in the print pop a lot more and really nicely compliment your main piece. Its a pretty easy way to figure out what colors would go nicely with a dress, even though you can usually pick any color you like. The important thing to think about is balancing the colors, so that you have all the colors in each section from top to bottom.

I will be doing more posts like this so be sure to check back for that and more!

//Love Mintyfrills

Improved Outfits [1]: Color Coordination - 1 Base color

There are many ways of putting together a lolita outfit and I want to talk about some different ways of  coordinating colors. Lets start simple with some looks at how to match with the base color of the main piece. 

I think many start with wearing a neutral white blouse to go with pastel colors. Though I think going with all pink with a pink dress makes for a much cuter outfit. You could also make it more interesting by matching with a different shade of the same color, but lets talk more about that in a future post! While doing this type of outfit I would favor ankle socks over otk socks since your legs break off the color scheme. If you don't like bare legs I would suggest thin white stockings with the pink outfit and black fishnets with the black one.

Even though this dress is in the grey colorway you can choice to treat black as the base color since it has the black ribbons and a lot of black in the print. Even though I would love a coord using this dark grey as the base and black as the accent, its hard to find items in this kind of grey from Angelic Pretty. Even though light grey has become more prevalent in many collections. 

In the next guide I will go into how to do outfits with more colors! 

//Love Mintyfrills

Event: Confusion Lecture

I'm happy to say that I will be holding a lecture about j-fashion at ConFusion! I'm hoping to give some practical advice to make it feel easy to start with j-fashion, its for anyone! I might try and post some things from the lecture here on my blog later.

I will also be selling handmade things in the artist alley. Like my rosettes and other cute things, please come there and say hi to me! Maybe we can take a picture together? <3

See you there!

//Love Mintyfrills

Lolita Coording Guide [3]

We continue coording game this time with Angelic Pretty's Melody Toys. Above you see the same style of coording that I showed you with Toy Parade in the first part. Again we check what colors we find in the print. This is a three color print, it has pink, yellow and sax. The mint color is just past of the mint colorway and you can't find it in the other colorways. This means the mint colorway will give you an additional color too coordinate the dress with even though its hard to coordinate mint with sax because the are not contrasting colors (still worth a try!). When you are buying dresses try check what colors are in the print because these are most of the time pretty easy to coord with. See what can match with what you have.

Bellow you see the three color coording style that I showed you in the second part. As pink and yellow are in the print in both the colorways below it works with both! You might of notices that when coording with two colors the shoes are the same color as the dress, but not when with three colors. That's because you want to try and balance the colors and try to not have the same color beside itself.

//Love MintyFrills

Lolita Coording Guide [2]

Continuing on coording with Angelic Pretty's dress Toy Parade (first part here!). Here are some simple ways to turn it into a three color coord. I think the most simple way to spread the colors evenly is to make the shoes and bag the same color and then have the blouse and socks be the same, as you can see in my examples. I think this really makes the coord stand out, I love doing three color coords! We are still sticking to the colors that are in the palette from the print. Getting a new set of blouse and socks in the same color can give you so many new coording options for a relatively cheap price tag. This is an other reason that I prefer to have a jsk instead of the op, it just leaves you with so many more options.  

Try finding more accessories in the color palette that you have picked and try to spread out the colors as well as you can. Like having the lavender rosette pin on the top of the jsk makes a world of difference, this one is from EyeCandy. I think coording with yellow and lavender like bellow makes for a really interesting coord! 

//Love Mintyfrills

Lolita Coording Guide [1]

A lot of Lolitas fall into the habit of wearing the set and just sticking to that same cookie cutter outfit. But there is so much more you can do to make your dress feel more versatile. I'm going to show a bunch of ways how to coord this same dress, in this post I will keep it simple with two color coords. When deciding what color to have with your print dress first look at what colors it has in the print. Toy Parade has mint, pink, lavender and yellow in the print. This makes it very easy to coord with those colors as you can see on the picture below. When the bag, socks and blouse have the same color the coord will look balanced. And I think the color that contrasts to the dress looks much more interesting than just wearing a white blouse. 

//Love Minty

Cult Party Kei video guide

My Cult Party Kei guide is finally done! I hope you like it! I worked really hard on it so I would really appreciate if you shared it! 

//Love Minty

Lolita Coord Help: Basic color balancing

This is a simple way of color coordinating that works great for basic sweet coords. You always have to make sure that colors are balanced. One color for blouse, bag and socks and an other for shoes, dress and headbow. Think of the dress as the main color and the other colors are accents, we are now working with just one accent color to make it easy. 

Above you see a breakdown of the blocks for this coord. See how the both the main color and the accent color are in all the three blocks, it makes it look balanced. Its also good that the accent color breaks of the main color. Try to get the colors one after the other. Pink headbow, white blouse, pink dress, white bag, more pink dress, white socks, pink shoes. 

Here under you see some more examples with any colors than white as the accent also. I'm trying to make this as clear as possible so comment and ask if anything is unclear so that I can fix it. I will post more guides on how to do coords with multiple colors and much more.

//Love Minty

Basic Make-up Tutorial

Made this basic make-up tutorial of my daily make-up. I know the lights a bit bad and the music a bit loud, but hope its still okay! Don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel!

//Love Minty

Basic shironuri makeup tutorial

This is a simple illustrated guide in how to do a basic shironuri makeup. This is my style of doing it and I almost always work around this basic design, there are tons of different ways of course. You should always experiment and find what fits your face and style the best! Make sure to clean your face properly and put on whatever day cream you use, the makeup will look better on soft and clean skin.

The first thing to do is put in whatever colored lenses you are going to wear, since I'm going to have mostly green color in the makeup I pick purple as it is a good contrast and will make your eyes pop more. its important to t in your lenses first to not get white paint in your eyes. Always make sure you have clean hands before putting in your lenses. Circle lenses are an important part of the makeup and it will look a bit of without them.

Next step is to remove your eyebrows, if you really don't want to loose your eyebrows there are ways of covering them up but it is a lot more work, I will put in a link to a guide on how to do just that. The reason to not have your eyebrows is because we will make your eyes huge by moving up the eyelid fold and eyebrows. If you are going to remove them you can either use tweezers or shave them off. Using tweezers will make them grow out more smoothly and shaving them off is faster and hurts less but will leave you with a harder stub when they grow out. Personally I remove my eyebrows.

Then its time to put on the white base! I use a white cosplay foundation that I bought i Japan, but with whatever white foundation you will want to carefully dot it on with a makeup sponge, do not just paint it over as this will create lines. Be sure to cover your whole face, ears and neck. When you are done with this take thick layer of white loose fixing powder on a sponge and dot it on carefully. Be sure to not get the white foundation on the sponge. Use a lot of powder and when everything is covered just brush of the excess powder with a big makeup brush.

Start applying the eye-shadow, put it on pretty high on the eyelid and make a fade from the outside and in from green to white.

Continue with the eye-shadow and build up a bigger eyelid, the darker green lines should be right under where your natural eyebrows would be. Make it go out and down from your eyes on the outside since we will be making your eyes bigger.

Now put on a sharp eyeliner, use a liquid eyeliner to get really jet black lines. Draw in the upper line and make it continue down from where the eye ends on the outside. Make the bottom line go down to about where your eyebags are and then start going up to your eye in about the middle and in to the corner.

Make a shadow of green outside of the bottom line.

Now its time to put on your eyelashes, make sure to have really long and thick eyelashes for the top since we have made the eyes so much bigger. You can also use two pairs of eyelashes to make them thicker. They should start where the outer corner of your eyeliner is. Also have eyelashes on the bottom, it works great using the ones that are made to be more natural top lashes as bottom lashes just make sure they are turned the other way to that they go downward.

Start painting your new eyebrows on about a cm above where your natural ones are, I prefer smaller and shorter eyebrows. Paint on the shape you want with eye-shadow in a color that matches the hair you will have.

Make them more look like eyebrows by shading over with a darker color in the middle and drawing short lines to make it look like hair.

Next paint your lips, you can use white foundation mixed with lip-balm and then eye-shadow to color them. A light shade of the color on the eyes work well and have them be a bit darker in closer to your mouth.

Now just put on a wig and you are done to go out and scare children.. ehhr... I mean go out and look fabulous and take those selfies.

Here are two examples of variations of this basic design that I have had:

Hope you liked this guide! Thanks for reading.

//Love Minty