Marbling is Hard

As covered in yesterday's post, I wasn't in love with Chanel Riva on its own. Thus I decided to try making it better with my first attempt at water marbling. I read a bunch of tutorials before I started; when I reached a point where more research was making me more confused rather than less, I stepped away from the computer and got down to playing. To complement Riva's light blue hue, I selected OPI Oh So Glam, Sally Hansen Night Hydrangea, and China Glaze Towel Boy Toy for my marbling colors.



I masked off my skin with wide cellophane tape, as I thought that would be less messy than dealing with Vaseline (also, I couldn't recall if I had any Vaseline in the house or if I did, where it might be).



Next, I dropped the polish into one of the small disposable cups of water that I'd lined up on the table ahead of time.



I then swirled the polish in the cup with an old orange stick, but did not take pictures because I wasn't sure how much time I had to work before the polish hardened. I dipped my finger in the cup and carefully removed it. I repeated the steps three more times with three more cups. In one, I added clear to mix to see if that would let more of the base color show through. I doubled dipped my pinky finger to see what that would look like. After all that, I ended up with this mess:



"Hmm", I thought, "maybe it'll look okay after clean up". Well, not so much, as it turned out, though I didn't help matters by not waiting quite long enough to apply the top coat, so I ended up with streaks among the swirls on some nails.



My pinky nail is my favorite of these not-so-great results.



What I like about this: The color scheme. That I tried something new. I got to use several colors at once. The tape did its job and clean up wasn't worse than a regular mani. What I don't like: The chunky-ness of the color sections (I think I need to add more rings to the cup and swirl more. The way I managed to get some good parts of the swirls on the taped parts of my fingers rather than the nail (will have to pay closer attention to where I'm dipping). The bubbles (not sure what to do about that). I'll try water marbling again but my intial impression is that it's not something I'm too excited about (unlike the first time I tried stamping, when I was all "when can I get more plates?"). I'd be grateful for any hints or tips you'd all care to leave in the comments.

*****

On an unrelated note, I've been feeling jealous of several nail board and nail blogger meetups I've seen posts about and decided the best way to deal with that was setting up a meet around here. Since the nail board at MakeupAlley moves fast, I wanted to mention it here as well. If you're a nail boarder poster or a nail blogger in the metro Detroit area and would like to be added to the planning mailing list, please e-mail me (the.karend at gmail.com) with your MUA username and/or blog URL.