First Water Marbling Attempt!

Today I have for you my very first attempt at a water marble mani! I've always looked at pictures and tutorials for water marbling and thought that I'd love to give it a go some time, but I was never brave enough. Well, yesterday I plucked up the courage to give it a good go. It took a fair while but I have to say I'm pretty happy with how it came out considering it was my first go... To the pics...

Here it is! I used three of my gorgeous a-england polishes - 'Saint George', 'Excalibur' and 'Avalon' - and OPI 'No Room For The Blues'.

I came up with this colour combo in the middle of the night the other night and I think it was pretty cool. I want to try a bit more subtle water marble in the near future, but I do love how this one looked. 'Excalibur' tended to spread further than the others so that's why the silver is a bit more prominent in 2 of my fingers.

 

You can see what I mean about the silver spreading in these photos (plus I just love the look of the bullseye! So pretty). A handy tip I picked up from LTHP was to use a smaller glass so that you can get a tighter bullseye with less polish, though in saying that I didn't actually end up doing a tight bullseye at all.

There's a couple of kinks that definitely need to be ironed out. I'm not 100% sure why, but I got a few bubbles. I have actually since found a pretty awesome little tips and tricks post from Lacquerish that may explain this little problem. Like I said earlier, I am definitely going to be giving this technique another go soon, hopefully with a bit more finesse thanks to the things I've learned! It was so much fun, albeit very messy!

These are the designs on my thumbs. I didn't really get fantastic pictures of them, but you can certainly get the idea. My thumbs ended up being some of my favourites! Both of my thumbs some how came out with perfect little french tips in silver on my right thumb (see the left side of the top pic) and in purple in my left thumb (the right side of the bottom picture) - please excuse the tip wear, I got called into work last night and they got a bit thrashed!

Just because this is a post about my first marbling attempt, I thought I'd better pop in a photo of the actual first finger. This is on my left hand (hence it not being in the other photos) but it's kind of cool. Very different to the more flower sort of designs on most of my right fingers.

So what do you guys think? I had so much fun doing this mani and I can't wait to try some other exciting techniques. Anyone with any tips or suggestions about how to avoid pesky water bubbles, please let me know in the comments section! One other small problem I had was with top coat. Every single one of my top coats except one, Essie's 'Good To Go', made the polishes go all blended and cloudy. Particularly 'Saint George' would tend to mix with both 'Excalibur' and 'No Room For The Blues'. Curious, but luckily I tried my other top coats on my left hand fingers and thumb before doing anything on my right fingers :)