Practising the art of water marbling...

...and actually getting a little better at it!

I remember that I chose the manicures I wanted to recreate for the Nail Challenge Collaborative under the aspect of "trying again". This is another one that might not look like a total failure, but it basically is. The first one was painted, because I couldn't get the marbling right, but I liked the color combination so much, that I did it the simple way. But this time I managed to do a pretty decent water marble. Yay!

"And the third manicure for the Nail Challenge Collaborative's month of July. Another recreation. In this case a failed #watermarbling that worked out so much better this time. But it's never going to be a go-to nail art technique for me. Polishes were the same as in 2011! Essence - Replay, Manhattan - 51K, p2 - virgin."

The original manicure can be found -->here<--


I still like the original manicure. :) But... I had nubbins! That's like half of my current (December) nail length!

The Lazy Days of Summer 9: Thirst Quencher

Hello everyone~

I'm so glad the week is over... It was a hard one and I made a few mistakes that could have been avoided. But as usual... they bother me forever, because of the scolding by my superiors... meh. At least, one day off until Monday. Let's hope the coming week is a tiny bit kinder to me, haha.

Anyway, while I was on vacation last week, I worked on the challenge and finished all the themes except the last one, which I'll probably tackle tomorrow. Today, I'd like to post about theme number 9. The time was "Thirt Quencher" and and first, I wasn't sure what to do, because my favorite would be mineral water. Yes, boring. And the other things I like kinda where close to what I had in mind for theme number 10, Favorite Fruit...

When I posted about my last watermarble attempt, I got a really nice comment from Sue, who recommended me a tutorial and I decided to try once more! A watermarble appeared to be a suiting means to represent a thirst quencher. I chose three of the Woo neon's a colleague brought me from her holiday in Turkey to create the marble.

I first applied white polish to my nails, an unnamed one by Color Club, protected my skin with some vaseline and tried to watermarble just as the tutorial suggested. It worked a lot better than the last time, even though I still need to practice the dipping angle as there are still a couple bubbles.

The colors weren't as bright as I imagined them to be, but I like the overall outcome. I found it to be lacking something to really represent a thirst quencher... remember, mineral water!? I like it sparkly. so, I applied one coat of each of the three wonderful Seventeen flakie polishes I got from Cel.

I love flakies. Subtle, but so effective to totally change the look of any polish...

What do you think?

That's it for now. Have I mentioned that I didn't buy any nail polish this week!? :D
Have a fun weekend!

Another try on the water marble

Hi everyone!

I hope everybody is having a nice sunday doing something fun and relaxing! We finally got a day of sun here, so I really enjoyed taking a long walk with my dog earlier today. Now, I'm looking forward to the coming week supposedly being a sunny one!

The manicure I want to post about today is an old one. I did this sometime in June, I think. Not sure. It was the weekend after I got myself a set of Color Club neons from my local TK Maxx, that's for sure. I still haven't identified the set as the set and the polishes inside weren't labeled. But they were so bright and fun looking that I decided to try my luck with watermarbling again.

First of all, I painted my nails white to make the neons pop. Some say it's not necessary, I prefered to do so. For the marble, I used some bottled water that had no gas inside anymore (bleh...). Conviniently, it was room temperature too.

From the set, I picked a yellow, orange, pink and violet to marble with. The colors spread out okay, but I really have to get faster at drawing my patterns. I used a sewing pin to do so and it worked well, as long as I was fast enough. Also, I remembered taping my fingers this time which proved to be helpful.

The violet seems to be really sheer when used as a marble color, because I barely shows up. The orange and yellow blended a little bit too much, but I liked the look nevertheless. I'm not so happy with those huge air bubbles that formed though. Is there any trick to prevent those?

In the end, I took off all of the marbles except the ring finger one, the prettiest in my opinion, and re-painted them using a violet similar to that washed out one from the marble. I didn't take any pictures though. Even though only one nail was neon colored, the whole thing was still very bright for me. I think the whole marble would have been too bright for work anyway.

What do you think? Any tips to share? Does anyone know what Color Club neon set these might be from?

Have a great sunday! Until next time~

Water Marble Mess

It has been a long time since I tried to do a water marble mani. I failed every single try so far... but on New Years Eve I felt like trying again and I think I'm starting to get the hang of it.

It seems that I can't use my local tap water to water marble. It doesn't matter if the tap water is cold, warm or room temperature, the nail polish just clumps and falls to the bottom of the cup. So I tried bottled water. Well, I only have sparkling mineral water, which meant that I had to wait a little while until I could try to marble. ^^; But it worked. The polish didn't clump at all! When I try next time, I'll know what to do. I have to practice dragging the polish correctly, but I think for my first real try it looks ok.

Excuse the messy look. I didn't tape my fingers well enough it seems ^^;

I like my thumbs the best. I love how in some parts, the polishes would mix up to create a new color but still look crisp enough. I used p2 fancy, OPI Glitzerland and a brown polish by [b]asic.

A day later, I added one coat of essence Make it golden. It looked better in real life, but I still didn't like it too much ^^;

Have you tried to water marble? Any tips you want to share with me?