How to: Water Marble Nails

Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter

Before you read this post I must first warn you. This was initially meant to be a tutorial on how to create a great water marble nail look. On all nails. And not just the two I managed to do. There you go, you have been warned. 

Now read on!

I initially saw this nail art on the blog Another Bottle of Nail Polish?! (abbreviation ABOP) 

Loved it. 

Tried it. 

Failed at it.

The Materials

To start with, you will need whatever it usually takes to have a clean set of nails. For me, it usually consists of:

1.   A couple of nail files, 
2. Nail polish remover and cotton wool
3. Vaseline for moisturising your hands after washing/soaking them in water. If you ask me, one can never have enough vaseline for moisturising, hence both bottles. 

 

You will also need:

1. The nail polish colours that you wish to do this trick with. For me, those are the three in the middle - gold, nude, pink. I later decided to add black which isn't featured in the picture. 
2. Base coat - I used the top coat as a base coat
3. Base colour - featured extreme right. I used this white colour simply because I saw ABOP use a similar colour.
4. Top coat.

And lastly, you will require: 

1. A bowl - to conduct this little experiment in
2. Toothpicks - to help with the design/pattern
3. Cellotape - to protect your nails. Apparently this is an important step.

The Process

1. Start with a clean set of nails. 
2. Use a base coat and then your chosen base colour. 
3. Cellotape the areas surrounding your nail so as to protect your skin from the excess nail polish. 
4. Fill the bowl with water and start by adding just a drop of each nail polish colour.

[See pic below]

Don't worry about making the circular patterns yourself, it'll all happen el naturale baby.

5. Using a toothpick, draw a line across the nail polish that's set on the water. This forms a heart shape which makes my heart smile.

6. Now draw horizontal lines across the heart. You could also choose to draw more lines across that.

But whatever you do, don't get carried away with the drawings.

7. Dip your nails into the pattern and right into the water, making sure that you move all the excess nail polish that was left on the surface of the water to the sides before taking your nails out.

The Mistakes

Clearly I was having a little too much fun with it all. Not only did I forget to put the cellotape on one hand, but I started trying to make butterfly patterns out of the nail polish!

 

Ladies and gentlemen - the messy ugly look that I was not going for. 

THIS is the look I was trying to go for. Clearly there are a few tips I needed to have learned from ABOP before starting. And THIS is the video I watched that got me all excited about marble nails.

Now I have 2 nails with a water marble pattern. The rest are pink.

 

Hope you have better luck trying this out! 

Something tells me I may need a couple more practice shots before I do any other tutorial. 

P.S: Let's stay friends despite my ill tutorial.