Oh Say Can You See

This post may be awfully written since I'm dying of a migraine and our air conditioning is out when it's 103* and rising, but it's time sensitive so it's got to get done.


Woohoo!  While writing that first sentence a friend came over and swooped my kids away to A/C so at least that's a load off my migraine.  Let's see how this goes.

For the last few weeks I have been really excited to do some sort of themed manicure for The 4th of July and have been thinking on it.  I had a lot of ideas, and in the end I decided my freehand still looks a bit too amateur a lot of the time, I'm short on SV to do a tape mani the way I'd like, and my stamping skills and polish selection aren't up to the task yet. So water marbling it was!

I've been asked a lot how to do this, so I'm hoping to do a tutorial to add to the plethora of water marble tutorials available next week when I do a request for friend, but for now, you're going to get a few process pics and the end result.

Please pardon the awful color, my main point was to show the design and my processing computer died yesterday, so I tried to fiddle with these in some freebie program on my media server. After spending most of the day working on this post, I decided showing you what designs I did was more important than getting the colors right.

 I really hate posing nails like this, but there aren't terrific options with water marbling where you really want to show off as much of all 10 nails with as few frames as possible.

Polishes
Base Coat:  Gelous
Underwear:  Savvy French White White
Marble:
Wet N Wild I Red a Good Book
Wet N Wild Blue Moon
Savvy Fre
nch White White
Glitter Coat:  Wet N Wild Hallucinate
Top Coat:  Seche Vite

On my right hand I tried to use the Hallucinate in the marble too, but it didn't work well.  Putting it as one of the first colors caused it to dry before I could marble and putting toward the end and my solid color drops weren't spreading so the glitter ended up mostly just being lumps under the polish.  I was bummed because I wanted streaks like my last marble instead of all over, but such is life!  The biggest difference it made though is you can see the colors on my right hand are more primary, on the left, for some reason the white interfered more with the red and blue and I ended up with more pastels.  But the right also made a bunch of purple, so in the end, nothing ended up being a BRIGHT red, white, and blue as I planned.

I also wanted to try out nail polish jewelry, making a ring that would match my manicure!

This was HARD to water marble.  I have some ideas for next time, which will be happening, because the polish and adhesive never set thanks to the A/C going out.  I managed to keep it on well enough until the end of the night, then I got home and it fell apart.  It'll be taking an acetone bath soon.

Some process pics for you:

Somebody Loves Me!

And that somebody is my husband!  I've been sick on the couch since yesterday and I've needed a redo on my mani.  The water marble gave up after a week.  Three polish plates popped of climbing in a bounce house with my Girl Scout troop Thursday.  Then some started peeling, chipping, and cracking.  But I was almost out of acetone and there just no point in trying without plenty on hand.  So the dear ran out to Sally's to pick some up.  I mentioned that they were having another Red Dot sale and he went and had them pull all of their back stock of a discontinued color I had mentioned.  Now, 9 extra bottles of one polish color may be excessive, we'll see.  Maybe if this blog gets off the ground I have giveaway stock now, or I'll sell some once they're HTF.  But for now, I can do whatever nail art I want with it without worry because it's going to be a very long time until I have to worry about running low.

China Glaze Riveting

Water Marble Mini Me

The day after I did my first water marble mani on myself, my youngest came down with a fever and we were stuck on the couch for the day.  She's a total diva and more into the beauty stuff than I, so why not take advantage of her lethargy to give her a really neat mani!

Base of NK Really White

Water Marble with NK Really White and Crayola Grape Raisin, Blueberry, Green Apple, Orange, and Bubble Gum

Top coat 2 coats of SV 

Unfortunately her manis don't last very long because she's a dedicated picker, but she enjoyed it while it lasted!

Water Marble!

I really, REALLY tried to put this technique off until my nails were a bit longer, but I just have no patience.  This was so much fun, there was very little learning curve to it, and it really didn't take that long for the results that come out of it.  I had originally planned to just do it on accent nails, but it was too fun and easy, I'd do two, top coat it, and within an hour, I was doing another pair of fingers!  I ended up with a full mani that's impressed everyone.

I started with a base coat of Gelous, 2 coats of Sinful Colors 24/7, and 2 coats of Seche Vite.  I know, we've started this off with a lot of polish already!  I probably could have just used one coat of the 24/7 since it's just underwear, but the 2 coats of SV is really necessary because if you get a bad marble, you can use your clean-up brush and some acetone to brush off the marble without bringing the underwear with and then slap on more SV and save starting over from scratch!  Since I had this happen 3 times (I was trying for a certain design, otherwise this has a much higher success rate), it seems to have been a good plan.  I topped the marbling with at least 4 coats of SV.  This is good and bad as you'll see later.

Sorry about the weird color balance, these pigments are very hard to correct for, the nails are pretty true to life, my hands are not that color ;P

     

Sinful Colors 24/7 and Dream On, China Glaze Riveting, NK Really White, LA Colors Black Velvet

I think Riveting has become a serious favorite of mine. Can you see on the middle finger of the picture on the right how it's swirled over the black?  AMAZING!  I'm going to have to stock up on it since it's already hit the clearance racks and will be HTF soon!

This is the best home mani I have ever had!  Here's how my left hand looks 6 days later.

Overall standings:  Day 3 one finger's full plate of polish popped off, I saved it and re-glued it once I returned home (ring finger in this picture, looks the same as the day I put it on, that white at the edge is polish, not chipping);  Day 5 another polish plate fell off, I re-glued it (pointer finger in this picture, my aim was off, it's glue too far back so you can see some exposed nail at the tip, oops);  Day 5 a not so small, but not huge chip on my right thumb, not very noticeable though, I can live with it;  Day 5 same thumb polish plate popped off, re-glued it and it looks just as good as new except that chip.

As you can see, Day 5 seems to be hitting the limit, but I'm going to try to wear them through Friday to show off at a gathering I go to on Fridays, that will mean over a week with the same polish!  AMA-ZING!  That pop off on Day 3 was my nail snagging and ripping at something, frankly I think the polish saved my nail from breaking, so not too shabby.  The thickness caused by all the polish plus my excessive coats of SV creates a lot of strength and depth which I like, but it's a catch 22.  The thickness saved my nail plus allowed the "plates" to pop off in a repairable way instead of chipping or peeling, but it may have also led to them popping off in the first place, maybe they wouldn't have popped off if I didn't put so many layers on?

One thing I noticed and am really frustrated by:  When the nails came off, I got to see what my nail plate looks like after nearly a week with the same polish on, and they're quite stained.  24/7 isn't all that well pigmented, obviously while Gelous is providing the strength I need to grow my nails out, it's not protecting the plate from staining.  I'm working hard at staying well-hydrated to prevent as much as I can, but what's your favorite base coat?  Does it do a good job at preventing stains?