Water Marble Success! Well, mostly...

Hello, fellow hobbyists! I had an unusual desire to do water marble the other day, something I've never fully succeeded at, though I've done water marbling using the transfer method - putting plastic down in the marble and then cutting out nail-sized designs from that once it's dry. This was a spur-of-the-moment urge, though, and I asked on my Facebook what colors I should use. Pink, purple, and turquoise were suggested...well, I had a brand-new purple polish, since I had stopped by Walgreen's and picked up the new Sinful Colors Leap Flog, along with a re-released Winterberry, and while I don't really have turquoise in my stash palette, I did have several nice pastel blues to choose from that would go well with the purple and pink idea.

After putting base coat and my base color of Sinful Colors Snow Me White, I taped off all the fingers on my left (non-dominant) hand, and then used Sinful Colors Winterberry, Cinderella, and China Glaze Innocence in my water bowl. I was so excited that I was literally squealing out loud when the first finger came out of the dip looking beautiful. The second (my middle finger) was a bit muddled due to bubbling, but it still wasn't bad looking, so I soldiered on. I absolutely LOVED the way my ring finger came out. After they dried for a while, I decided to try some dotting on them, as I've seen other people do dots on their water marble and it looks so perfect. Well, I'm not terribly creative (I'm a good technician, but not so good at figuring out which colors look good together, arranging them artistically, or any of the design elements that put good nail art over the top to great art work) so I really wasn't happy with the dot work I did on my pinky finger, but my index nail? NAILED IT! My thumb came out pretty darned awesome, too, and I couldn't bear to add dots to my ring finger. The index finger on my left hand, though, became everyone's favorite:


             
 Then, of course, there was the taping and dipping of the right hand. Not surprisingly, my swirling of the polish in the water was a little less defined using a hand with tape over every finger. Heh. They still came out okay, though, which is saying something! When I dipped my index finger, though, the design looked perfectly normal on the top of the water. However, one of the reasons water marbling can go fatally wrong is because the design you see becomes the bottom layer on your nail. What actually shows on your nail is whatever's on the underside of the layer of polish in the water. Which, apparently, was more than a little blobby for that nail.


 It wasn't so bad that I wanted to re-do it, but it's definitely different to the rest of the nails. Though, one of my co-workers decided it was her favorite!