Dry Marbling Funky French

Once again, my friend V's nails are visiting our blog. I honestly haven't been feeling that creative this past week, but between her ideas of what she wanted and my ideas of what I can do, we came up with something that she really loved and I think suits her personality and looks good on her nails! And what more can you ask of a manicure, really? 

To create this look, we started with a base coat (we normally use a ridge-filling base coat for V, but since we were going with a sheer base color, we used my clear base coat instead) and then painted one coat of China Glaze Fast Track. It's not clear, but its color looks the closest to nude I can come to V's skin tone in my palette, and the glitter just adds that touch of oomph.  

I taped her fingers off at an angle with standard French manicure tape and then painted a thick coat of China Glaze Foie Gras. I then added drops at random of China Glaze Solar Power, Riveting, and Harvest Moon, and then swirled them gently with my thinnest dotting tool. We decided to marble the whole thumb, though I did leave a few bare spots to show off the Fast Track. After letting that dry for a bit, I took a striper brush and lined the French tips with China Glaze Electrify. Since we didn't have tips on the thumbs, I just striped along a few of the most prominent swirls. Here's a picture with flash to show off the sparkle:

When I pulled out the colors I intended to use for this marble, V looked askance at the bright yellow. She claims yellow doesn't look good on her, and in large amounts, she's right. But we were doing a "fall colors" manicure, and I knew that yellow would be the perfect color to make it POP and keep all the browns from just melding together. She had to stop and just look at her nail after I finished the first marble tip, because she was amazed at how it ended up.