Water Marble | Craftynail

We’ve made it to the halfway mark of Short And Sweet in Texas‘ nail art challenge! Day 15 is all about water marble..if you don’t know what it is here’s a good youtube video by DearNatural62. If you’ve ever water marbled before then you know how fun it is to pick out a bunch of cool colors for your swirly design! But have you ever thrown a clear polish in the mix??? That’s what I’m experimenting with today- water marbling with clear polish!

I started by painting my nails with a cool combo of 3 neon colors. It looked awesome so I took some pics which I may share on day 22/neon day of the challenge 🙂 Then I did the water marbling technique using only 2 polishes- clear and black. So basically I dripped drops of black, then clear, black then clear, etc into the cup… and when I swirled it around with a toothpick I got this cool black design with clear ‘spaces’ in between. The spaces allow the bright neon to show through from underneath. Pretty neat! Then I made a few polka dots using my black polish and a dotting tool just to spice it up (and fill in the gaps).

And in case you are wondering how clear polish works for marbling…. other bloggers have said that topcoat or clear polishes don’t spread well in the water. I actually experienced the opposite- I found that my Sally Hansen Nail Shine Miracle actually spread better than all of my other pigmented polishes! This is great news for me since I thought I hated my Nail Shine Miracle- I never use it as a topcoat since it bubbles and takes forever to dry. But now that I know it works for marbling- it has a new purpose in my stash!

I like how bright this design is in real life- it’s kinda crazy lookin! I went outside during sunset and my polish was so neon it nearly jumped right off of my fingers! Too bad I didn’t get that cool ‘signature’ swirly marble design though- I wound up with these black and clear stripes instead. No matter what I did I just couldn’t get my polish to drag properly with the toothpick. So no swirls for this girl…. but my black and clear stripes still look cool! Water marbling… why you so tricky?

I finally attempted my first water marble! I’ve watched so many youtube videos on water marbling that I thought I might ace the technique on my first try. Well, that was a good theory. I did have some issues… mostly because of water temperature I think. I used filtered water as everyone suggests, but my water may have been too cold because the polish didn’t spread out over the surface well. Also, I found that not all polishes behave the same way in water. I had to eliminate my white wet n wild polish because it was being a huge P.I.T.A. ! After 4 or 5 tries with different temps and polishes- this is what I came up with. Not too bad for a first timer I suppose. I love all the Irish colors! Oh, and if anyone has any marbling tips- please leave me a comment!

Hope everyone has a fantastic St. Patrick’s Day! I will be cooking a turkey. It’s not traditional at all, but I felt the need to cook this weekend and that’s what I had in the freezer ! My boyfriend is busy painting so I will occupy myself in the kitchen. No St. Patty’s pub crawl for this girl!