Blue & Pink Swirl – Water Marble

It’s been awhile since I’ve done water marble art, and unfortunately, you can tell by how it turned out. Not my best work, but we all have flops sometimes, eh? Still, the nice thing about a marble is that people won’t necessarily realize it went wrong. ;-)

There’s a video at the end of the post...I’m afraid I’m still not all that great with the actual recording video part, and it shows, but it’s not too bad for my first try. The only way to get better is to practice, right? Maybe next time I’ll even keep my fingers in the center of the frame...

I used four polishes for this manicure – shown & labeled above. My “Megawatt?!” is really thick, which is why you won’t see it expand as much as the other colors in the video. Other than that, these colors worked really well, and I think they look pretty nice together too.

Before I started, I coated my fingers under the nail to the first knuckle and around the cuticles with petroleum jelly (next time I’ll probably use a thick homemade salve I normally use on my face). This prevents the polish from sticking to the skin – but as you’ll see, I should have gone farther down on my fingers with it...

I started with one coat of Seche Vite base coat, then added two coats of Finger Paints “Well-Cultured Pearl” as the base color.

Then I started dropping polish in my bowl of warm water. I cycled through Misa “Like It Like That”, OPI “A Rose Before Dawn...Broke by Noon”, and OPI “Megawatt?!”. One drop inside the other, as shown.

I didn’t get any good dipping pics, so you’ll have to watch the video for a slightly blurry demonstration of my amateur technique. This is the after-shot for one hand done.

I cleaned off the excess polish by simply wiping away the petroleum jelly with a paper towel (also show in the video), and then used a nail corrector pen (I generally use Avon) to clean up the rest.

And there you have it – a swirly water marble manicure (don’t mind my poor broken nails – ugh). Here's the video:

So what’s on your nails this week? And what kind of tips on water marbling do you have for me? I think I need to watch more of Colette’s videos...