So water marbling still sucks. Even this technique! This is the natural stone type look that you're supposed to get by spraying the polish floating on top of your marbling water with an alcohol based spray, but my hairspray was a little over zealous and the first thing I tried, a body spray, worked great but had something in it that killed my marbling water! Which meant I had to dump my water, clean my cup with soap, and then dry it and start all over. After doing one nail. *sigh* So aggravating.
I ended up using my hairspray just because I could reuse the water, but I wasn't able to use two out of three attempts because it would either disintegrate them into oblivion or just shrink them back into tiny, useless puddles. But I persisted until I had something acceptable.
Believe it or not, the hand painted skull was easier than the stinkin' water marbling! Sure, it took a little while to do, and it's not perfect, but I'd much rather do one painstaking nail than nine of them. So it's probably back to accent nails only when it comes to water marbling for this girl. Just too much hassle.
The end result was decent, though, and the color palette was simple: Julep's Winter was my base color (after a couple coats of their Oxygen Bonding Base Coat, of course), I did a few crumpled plastic wrap splotches with Erin, also by Julep, and then the marbling madness began using both Erin and, how could I resist, Boneyards by Cult Cosmetics. The skull was painted using all three colors plus a tiny bit of black.
I wanted to finish it with a matte top coat, but the one I used didn't really mattify it and they got all smooshed up by my sheets that night, which was highly disappointing. Gotta go back to my Essie Matte About You!
There are some pretty cool skulls that I saw, though, so be sure to check them out on Instagram under #clairestelle8oct. Here are the other prompts if you'd like to join in on the fun:
10/03: Bats
10/06: Autumn Colors
10/10: Skulls
10/13: Psychedelic
10/17: Witches
10/20: Pumpkins
10/24: Bones
10/27: Ghosts
10/31: Halloween
Oh and if you're looking for a how to on this kind of water marbling, cutepolish has a good one. Hers look way better than mine!