Water Marble Reloaded

Hello my lovelies! What are you up to on this fine Saturday? The sun is shining but it's freezing cold, so I'm not planning to get out of the house today. Instead I'm gonna relax and also write this post to show you some nails that I created last week and wore until a couple of days ago. If you've known my blog for a while you might know that I sometimes get inspired to create a water marble on my nails. This doesn't happen more than a couple of times a year though because water marbles are frustrating and they take a lot of time. It's been over a year since I created my last one so I was kind of in the mood to try one. But this time instead of using the regular method of dipping my finger in the water and creating a mess, I decided to create water marble decals. Here's how they turned out.

Coffee and Cream

Hello my lovelies! I'm back from vacation but I'm still at home because I only start work on Monday. So I thought I should catch up on blogging and show you a manicure from a couple of months ago. I don't know why I didn't post this earlier, I guess I was just lazy as usual. This manicure comes from a week when I had the sudden urge to do water marbles. It only lasted for a few days but at least I did two separate manicures which is a lot, considering that water marbles are very frustrating. For this particular one I used a polish that I don't like that much as a full manicure on my nails. Luckily, it works great for marbling so I managed to use it like this.

Monday Blues: Sky Blue Water Marble

Hello my lovelies! Don't you just love a Monday that feels like a Sunday? It's warm, the sun is shining and there's a summer vibe in the air. Not to mention that I have today off and slept in, so I finally feel rested. I promised more nail art last week and here I am, keeping my promise. I don't know what got into me but I was in the mood to do a water marble this weekend. I chose some shades of blue so it would be appropriate for today's post. Here's what came out.

TPA Group Challenge: Tutti Frutti

Hello lovelies and happy weekend! I've slept 3 extra hours this morning so this must be a very good day. Another reason why this is a great weekend is the fact that I finally managed to do some advanced nail art. It's been many weeks since I last participated in the TPA Group Challenge. I felt really uninspired but now I'm back! Today's theme was "tutti frutti", so naturally everyone did fruity nail art. I, however, chose to interpret this theme differently. Keep reading to see the explanation.

Monday Blues: p2 Crazy Beauty and Born Pretty Store Studs

Hello my lovelies! Today's Monday Blues posts comes a little bit later than usual because I'm still facing my post holiday laziness. I have a few things to tell you first. This is probably going to be my last post for this year (and the last Monday Blues of 2013 for sure) so I want to wish you all a very happy and amazing new year. 2013 was not a good year for me and I'm happy that it's over and I get a brand new start. Secondly, for those of you that want to take part in the Monday Blues of 2014, Ariel over at Lacquer: the best medicine has created inlinkz codes for every month of the year. Click here to see the document with all the links. I will also have it linked to the banner in my sidebar for easy access. Hope many of you will join in 2014! Now that we have that out of our way, let's take a look at today's nails. 

Sparkle Marble

Hello lovelies and happy Sunday! I haven't been posting as much as usual lately and I'm sorry for that. I really couldn't bring myself to write a post yesterday because I was very tired. But I promise it's gonna be better next week. Tomorrow is Monday Blues time and on Tuesday there's Polish Days. After that, I plan to do a few green themed posts for Saint Patrick's Day. So I hope you will stay tuned for all of that because I'm very excited. Today's manicure is a little unusual. I was very excited about this one but it didn't photograph properly. Let's take a look! 

My inspiration for this mani comes from the talented Jeanette from The Swatchaholic. She did a water marble using some Flormar polishes (link here) and it was absolutely gorgeous. So I decided to do the same thing and use only polishes from the Miracle Colors line. They are very sparkly and I thought they would look great together. And they did, just not on camera. 

The base I used was a day old manicure with Illamasqua Viridian (post coming up next week). I used 3 different Flormar polishes, U13 (pink), U08 (purple) and U25 (blue). Because U25 is very sheer, the parts covered by it showed a lot of the Viridian underneath, with just a bit of blue shimmer added. It actually looked very cool in reality, but on camera the purple and the green/blue parts look the same. So none of the cool 3-color shapes shows up in my pictures. I can assure you that this looked a thousand times better in real life. Here's a direct light shot to show you how sparkly this was. 

I honestly was in doubt if I should post this manicure, but I worked a lot on it and I think it still looks pretty cool. Maybe next time I'm gonna try it over a lighter base or using different colors from the same line. I could also try using one of the duochromes like Jeanette did. The possibilities are endless! 

Valentine's Marble

Hello my lovelies! I really hope you are doing great and the week is not too hard on you. Just a couple more days and it's Friday, so hang in there! Today is Wednesday so it's time for some pink. I only do this from time to time because I'm not big on pinks, but tomorrow is also Valentine's Day and it's the perfect time to post such a manicure. I hope you'll enjoy! 

I'm starting to get the hang of water marbling, but I'm still a rookie in the department. I really wanted to make heart designs and failed miserably. My biggest problem is choosing the polishes that will work well for marbling. I think somebody should make a tutorial for that. Anyway, this design is totally random but I like how it turned out. 

in the sun

I only used 2 polishes to make this because I tried it with 3 and they didn't want to cooperate. The bubblegum pink is Kallos 54, which I also used as a base for the whole thing. The other color is Golden Rose 202, a pink/purple sort of creme. I have no idea why it came out so different on the middle finger, but I didn't want to take everything off and redo it so we'll just say it's an accent finger or something. My thumb is the one where I tried my luck at heart shapes and failed miserably. 

I still think this is an awesome design for Valentine's Day. And if you're not good at water marbling you can also try some hearts or some studs. Do you celebrate Valentine's day? What will you be wearing on your nails tomorrow? 

My first successful water marble

Hello my lovelies! I'm so excited for today's post! I've been trying to master this technique for a while now and this is the first time I can actually show you the result. It's by no means perfect and there is no real pattern, so every nail is different, but I'm still happy with this mani. Here it is! 

For this water marble I used only Flormar polishes: two blues (423 and 438) and a green (437). Of course I used a white base underneath to make this opaque. I chose these polishes because I didn't want to waste any of my more expensive and hard to find polishes for this. But I'm happy to say that these spread nicely in the water and are pretty opaque. 

The first time I tried to marble with these colors was last weekend. But I kept getting these bubbles in the polish that wouldn't go away. I was so frustrated that I gave up. I then asked the lovelies on Instagram if they knew what that was. Turns out I was pulling my finger too fast out of the water. I also watched some videos from My Simple Little Pleasures on Youtube and found out that you have to pull your finger at a straight angle from the water. Seriously, head out to her channel and watch her videos because this lady is the queen of water marbling! I followed her tutorials and everything went great. No more weird bubbles in my polish! 

So now that I've nailed the basic technique, I need to learn how to create some patterns so that my nails look more similar and not that random. You can see that none of my nails has the same design as the other ones. Here's a photo of my left hand. This one looks even more different than my right one. 

I'm so happy that I finally got this right. This is the ultimate proof that you should never give up when trying something. Even if it's difficult in the beginning and you keep failing, you should try again. You will see that it will get easier eventually and once you get it right you will feel great satisfaction.