Week 30: Water Marble

Obviously, I need to pay attention to the Year's Challenge Schedule a few weeks ahead of time, since I just did a water marble a few weeks ago. :) Ah, the sacrifices we make for our art! Seriously, though, I've been having a lot of fun with water marble lately. I did the blue/purple/pink one not too long ago, which I would label my first "success" with the technique, and then I did water marble on V's nails last weekend. Regrettably (both for you AND me) I developed a migraine during the process, and had absolutely no interest in taking pictures by the end of it. They were pretty, though! ^.^ It was completely a Monkey See, Monkey Do Mani, because she saw my pin of a manicure and she wanted the exact same thing. The manicure in question? A water marble by Colores de Carol, using the new China Glaze On Safari collection:

Since I don't own the On Safari collection (yet!!), we hit our handy-dandy Sally Beauty store. Regrettably, they didn't have any Kalahari Kiss left (the bottle in the picture above), but we got our grubby little hands on both Call of the Wild and Desert Sun, which are really the two polishes that make this mani look like someone poured chocolate and caramel all over your nails. :) Oddly enough? Tan is apparently not that common of a color in nail polish stocked in the stores, let alone a yellow-shaded tan. Harrumph. Don't they know that brown is my favorite color? Why were there so few to choose from?

Since we didn't have the picture with us to compare colors to, and V really wanted *that* manicure, we bought a couple of different polishes, to decide which looked best in the actual water marble. We picked up China Glaze Sunset Sail (which turned out to be a significantly pinker tone than Kalahari Kiss), Finger Paints Don't Make a Scene and Putty in My Hands. (Of course, since the Finger Paints were on sale, buy two, get one free, we also grabbed Hue Are You? even though it's far too dark of a taupe to work in this manicure, but I was fairly sure it was a brown shade that wasn't in my polish palette yet. :)

We ended up going with Don't Make a Scene for V's mani, and it came out gorgeous, but for my water marble, I chose to use China Glaze Sunset Sail to go with Call of the Wild and Desert Sun. It's a lot less of a MSMD mani, but I really love the way it came out:

My favorite turned out to be the thumb on my right hand. My daughter's favorite (and my tie for second-fav) is the index finger on my left hand. (The other tie for me is my left thumb.) Still, I'm really happy with the entire manicure, though I'll admit to having re-dipped three fingers on my right hand (the three that look less orange, the index, middle, and ring fingers). They were done with all the same polishes, but due to some water issues, they came out very, very muddy. I changed out the water and then the thumb and pinky fingers came out fine. So I re-dropped, swirled, and dipped those three, which meant they look more brown and less caramel-colored than all the rest. (If you blow up the pictures, you can see the faint swirls under the light colored stripes, because I didn't bother to take off my polish or even put another layer of the base color on first. Sue me, it was nearly midnight! ;)

I'm also not sure what happened on the middle finger of my left hand to cause that large peachy blob. I like the way it fortuitously came out, but I have no idea *how* it came out like that, since it looked fairly symmetrical when I dipped my finger into it! :)

I tried multiple different swirling designs to come up with different looks. One of these days I'll try a water marble mani where I actually use the same swirl pattern in each one. Until then, I'm enjoying all the differences far too much to try and make them match up. :)

What are your opinions on water marble patterns? Which are your favorites, your least favorites? Are there any you don't like at all? Do you think it looks better when all the nail swirls go well together or do you like it better when they're all very different?