Chanel - Le Top Coat Lamé Rouge Noir

Green Marble.

It is my goal to stubbornly keep attempting the occasional water marble nail art until one day I might actually be able to pull them off with only a minimum of frustration! Still going for the darker, autumny colours, though my fellow nail bloggers make me feel like I should be on the Christmas train at this point.

Colours used are Dior, '605 Amazonia' and Catrice '670 It's Rambo No. 5'. The latter of which I've since given to my sister because in the many years I've owned it it has been used.. maybe twice.

Try, Try, Try Again.

That's the only way to learn, isn't it?
I'll probably do 499 terrible water marbles, but if the 500th attempt is the one, so be it.

Again went for more of an accent nail because that's just the visual aesthetic I prefer.


Colours used;
NYC, '003 Prey of Grey'
Bodique, '07 Red Love'
Hema, '809' (nail art striper)

Practice, Persistence, Perseverence.

Oh no! I found out this gray
had a little bit of an accident...

Or, alternatively, "I refuse to suck at this". I speak of course, of the nail art style that kicked my butt which was water marbling. The one that got away. My white whale, if you will.
I've complained about it on my previous post about water marbling, and one of my issues with the method stemmed from the frustrations of a lot of polishes not lending themselves to the technique (they wouldn't spread in the water properly). The post reads as pretty bitter.
In my practice runs I had thrown polishes together not really realising not all of them would simply work well together no matter how much one tried to telepathically will them to. I concluded that what I therefor lacked was knowledge.

And that knowledge would only come from testing and trying what works and what doesn't.

Testing in progress.

I'd decided to create a little database (read: list) for myself to work with the problem I had of not knowing what colours I had to work with that would lend themselves to marbling. So that in the future, I would know what I could grab that would work just fine and not have to deal with the disappointment of "oh, x and y would look great together!" only to realise those polishes had other ideas.
To limit wasting a bunch of nail polish on experiments, I mostly used my white nail art stripers (they do spread) that I don't use much, and paired them with the colour I wanted to try.

In italics means 'will spread, but not great'.

So, here is what I have so far. I was surprised to find that the will spreads outnumbered the will nots.
Unfortunately I still don't really have a large pool to choose from but if I just test some polishes every now and then I'll expand it quickly enough.

Marbled.

I've been meaning to try water marbling, it being one of those techniques that's so common but I'd never attempted it myself.

Estée Lauder - Blue Dahlia, Catrice - C05 Take It Mint

I then attempted it.
And sucked, terribly.
It was somewhat of a blow to the ego to find out there was a nail art technique I didn't just miraculously take to without all that much effort. It appeared I'd met my match. I did not quit, however, and gave it another shot.
This was my third try. I think it's okay. It is successful inasmuch that it has the marble effect on the nail.

It's not really my technique. Don't get me wrong, I think it can look absolutely amazing but when it comes down to it to me it's messy (which I hate), uncontrolled (which goes against my nature) and rather wasteful. One has to test a fair amount of polishes before you even find out what works with this, and then if you want to do more than two nails .. that's a hell of a lot of drops plopped in water, you know? To me, at least, the amount of nail polish expended is not worth the result. I may experiment with it again in the future, but probably not for more than accent nails like I did here. I can't imagine bothering with a whole hand, let alone two.