My take on dry water marbling

Ok, let's just get this straight.  I am the queen of suck when it comes to doing water marbling.  I shit you not when I say I get it everywhere and end up with a god awful mess both over my fingers and on the actual nail itself. In fact I'm sure I've told you this before!  The truth is, I had decided never to do another water marble again.

Then I saw the most amazing water marble ever done by Christine from Let Them Have Polish.  When you see something like that, it makes you want to try again.  Then I read a tutorial on dry water marbling by the Enamel Girl.  I really liked this idea, but wanted to make a few changes.  But first I will show my final products.  I tried this twice and therefore have two finished manis.

I know these are are far from good, but they are way better than anything I have achieved with water marbling before.

The biggest problem I have with water marbling is, first getting a nice image in the water, then trying to position the best part of that image correctly on my nail.  I also feel bad about the amount of nail polish that water marbling uses and surely I don't even need to mention the clean up.

My new technique allows me to pick and choose which parts of the design I like best, which fingers I want those design bits on and use one marbling design for multiple fingers.

What I did was create the usual water marble in the cup of water, use a plastic bag to pick up the design, let it dry, cut out the bit of the design I liked, apply it like a foil to my finger.

Here are some step by step pictures.

First make the best design you can with your polishes in the water.  I'm not going to go into how to do this because there are other bloggers out there that explain this, and do a far, far better job than me.

Cut out a piece of plastic from a zip lock bag that will fit inside your cup of water.  I also leave a little tag of plastic which makes grabbing it out easier.

Place you plastic over the pattern on the water.

Lift out the plastic with the image now attached to it.

Here is the underside of the image, straight after taking it out of the water

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Lay your piece of plastic on a tissue or some paper towel. (see my blue set of pictures below for an additional step I learned here)

Allow the polish to dry on the plastic, then cut out the bits that you want to apply to your nail.

Now, on a painted nail, that has been drying for at least 5 minutes (you really only need one coat just to make it grab, if you have more than one coat let it dry longer), place the piece of plastic on your nail with the polish facing down.

Firmly press the polish down around all the edges, then grab a corner and rip it off quickly.  The polish will remain on your nail and will have smooth and shiny finish.

Here is a second lot of pictures I did with the second mani. See how I suck at doing the pattern in the water!

Plastic goes in, lays flat on top of the water and is then lifted out.

Here is the plastic resting on a tissue. See the water drops on the design.

Here is my additional step, grab a tissues and gentle blot the water drops off the plastic. This just makes the design a bit cleaner in that you don't see water drops.  Don't forget though that where you blot off the water will actually be against you nail, not on the top, so you don't see it much anyway.

The finished piece of designer plastic after it had dried.

Lazy me just applied this over my existing mani.  I just did a quick top coat, and let it dry for five minutes.

Pushed onto my thumb nail.

Rip, just like waxing your leg.  See how it just peels off the plastic.  Obviously some clean up is required.

My other fingers ready to go.

Some errors I made were:

• Not waiting long enough for my underwear to dry (I mean the base coat of nail polish here ok).  It only needs to be slightly tacky, not wet.  If it's even slightly wet still, the polish wont transfer off the plastic.
• Not waiting long enough for the polish on the plastic to dry.
• Not waiting long enough before applying Seche Vite top coat.  My polish was still moist from being in the water, so I got bubbles with my top coat on some nails.
• Cutting the plastic designs too small for my nail.  I know, dumb beginners mistake this one. I did that on the ring finger on the pink design

So basically, being a little too impatient was my biggest downfall.

Now this was only my first (and second) attempt at doing this, and I was so happy that I had something I could leave on my nails. Plus it was a pretty clean exercise.  I also like that I can do up the marble designs transfer them to plastic then leave the plastic designs in may box with nail art stuff and apply these at a later date.

Sure I know I leagues away from anything like that amazing marble linked above, but I think I could create something better with practice.  So if you totally suck at doing water marbling the traditional, maybe you could try it this way?  What do you think?

EDIT - check out my later dry water marble here, it's much neater and shows how you can get better with practice.