Dabbling in Marbling

My favorite type of nail art is water marbling. I really think it looks amazing.

I've been practicing - it's not as easy as the masters make it look I assure you - and I feel I finally have one I can blog about. Plus discuss it as a newbie.

That white stuff in my cuticles is hand cream...eep!

The base is American Apparel Palm Springs. An extremely unforgiving shade on my skin tone. I actually did two separate manicures on two separate occasions with that polish - the formula is really nice - and then decided to water marble over the second manicure.

Palm Spings - a warm, dusty peach - lent itself easily to the other polishes in the array.
I used: unnamed Markwin gold (transparent, so basically only visible along the edges here and there), Borghese Lime, and an Essence bronze magnetic polish I recently blogged about here.

I found that the Essence did dry so fast that it was a quick drop, swirl with the toothpick and dunk into the water. I had none of that lounge-y time to take my toothpick and make a bunch of shapes.
Not to self: quick drying polishes aren't such a win.

Ok, I admit that I love these shades together. These remind me a Victorian garden room. Or, I will go out on a limb here and reference a movie that everyone should see: Fanny and Alexander. It should be noted that in that dark, cold, northern clime of Sweden, the art direction in that film made it all very warm, using little blue at all. Quite beautiful.

Back to water marbling.


Tape is a necessity. The more the merrier. I still have polish down to the second knuckle of my thumb because I relaxed a wee bit too deep into the water...yoiks.

I suggest a shallow dish. I cut down a plastic bottle and in retrospect I should have gone wider and more shallow.
The actual techniques that the Marbling Divas illustrate actually does work: blow on the top layer, use a toothpick to pull the excess out of the water and don't rush.

I did ding mine once, as you can see, and I did "double dip" (not cleaning off the top layer and then pulling my nail out)

Clean up brush helped a lot. For the bigger areas of real estate, I swabbed my fingers with acetone then rubbed it off on a tissue. Tape. Much more tape.

Really enjoyed this imperfect attempt.

To avoid water bubbles, which I've gotten in the past, I found a slow descent into the water helped, versus a jab into the water with your hand.

I tip my hat to those designers who can centralize hearts, four leaf clovers and stripes. I was pretty glad to get the design on the nail.

My goal is to do more stamping and marbling. Practice, practice, PRACTICE!

Thanks for reading my little nail polish journal!