My First Watermarble and Gradient

I finally decided that I am going to attempt to do a watermarble manicure. I've seen so many of them and read a bunch of tutorials on how to do them and I thought to myself "that seems simple enough, I can do that". But boy was I wrong! I am going to call the first watermarble attempt an epic fail, lol.

I started out with my bowl of room temperature bottled/filtered water in a small bowl ( I'm now thinking that I should have used a small cup like a dixie cup) and my polishes I would be using. In retrospect the smaller cup or bowl would have worked better because it would have been less surface for the polishes to cover once they were dropped in the water.

I preceeded to place drops of the polishes into the water in the order I wanted them, making a bullseye pattern. After I was satisfied with the amount of polish in the water I used a toothpick to slowly drag the polish into the pattern I wanted to create. I moved from center out. Then once my finger was taped up pretty good to protect my skin I slowly placed my finger into the center of my pattern, held it there for 10 seconds but not touching the bottom and then slowly pulled it out. I used my toothpick to move the dried polish away from my finger allowing it to smoothly come out of the water.

Now, I'm going to be honest and tell you that the pattern that ended up on my nails was not the pattern I had in the bowl. I had made a star pattern in the bowl and was hoping for something a lot cleaner that what I ended up with. After seeing my fail I later on went online to read a few more tutorials and figured out what I had done wrong. First of all I should have allowed my first drop of polish to spread all the way across the water, anchoring it to the sides of the bowl. Second I should have also dragged all the way to the edge when creating my design.

But just because I failed this time will not stop me from trying again. In fact I plan on trying again real soon! I'm gonna keep trying until I feel I have perfected it!

Next I decided to attempt my first gradient. I lined up the polishes I was going to use and the make-up sponge. Then, because I felt this would be easier to do, I just painted the polish directly onto the sponge in the order I wanted them. I made sure they touched and slightly overlapped since my middle color was white I wanted the red and the blue to fade into the white.

Then once I was ready, I just "sponged" or pressed it onto my nail and repeated this one or two more times until I got the desired result.

The gradient wasn't an epic fail but it wasn't the result I wanted. I think next time I am going to use less color to get the "fade" that I want. Stay tuned to see how my next attempt turns out!! :)