A Fail/Mixture of Water Spotting and Water Marbling

Water Sparbling

On Thursday night I was playing around with the water spotted and water marbling techniques for the first time and I had an idea! What if I water marbled 2+ colours, and then spotted/sprayed that? I'm sure I'm not the first person to do this, although I couldn't find any tutorials from a quick google search.

Anyway I'm very happy with how it turned out. When you spray polish that has been water marbled (when its still floating in the water) the colours separate out, and depending on the polish used you also get some spots. With the colours I chose I thought it looked exactly like a rock I had when I was younger (Yes before Ipads and video games we played with rocks!... or am I just strange?).
Unfortunately, much to my dismay, my mum threw my rock collection out, but luckily my Grandfather still had some specimens from his days traveling Australia as a civil engineer.
With a quick search through them I found the one I was looking for which is apparently called tigers iron, a banded iron formation of jasper, hematite and tigers eye unique to Western Australia. Here is a picture of my grandfathers iron core (from a mining drill thing) and some fossilized wood that also looked similar because its from the same area. The other image is from a google search and shows some tiger iron with lots of tigers eye in it which looks even more similar (Doesn't seem to be any tigers eye in the core sample)

Left: Half a core of iron ore from Marandoo mine near Mt Bruce and mt Tom Price. Right: Fossilized wood from Mt Newman.

Proper Tiger iron

And now for the nails:
The background is Misa Office Politics. I really love this colour but its really hard to match with anything. Its like a really dusty dark blue/grey. The marbling is done with Sally Hansen Xtreme wear Mocha Mix, and Sally hansen Xtreme wear Golden-i (A foil look gold polish).
At first I really didn't like this colour combo..... but its grown on me heaps. The marbling / spotting is just so interesting to look at!

Left Hand. I love how both my pinkies turned out

Left hand w thumb

Left hand- showing the pointer finger a little better... another one of my favorites

Right hand. The gold on the middle finger looks like a smiling skull from this angle in my opinion. From another angle it looks like a bear face missing one ear...It's kind of like finding shapes in the clouds.

 Ok, I tried to make a tutorial... However unfortunately I didn't bring the colours I used previously away with me for the weekend (we are having a weekend in Margaret River). I did my best with the polish I brought with me, but it wasn't quite as good. Also I didn't really go through how to water marble as I figure there is a bazillion other tutorials on that far far better than anything I could manage. It was my second attempt at marbling, so I didn't do a very good job.... but you can see how when you spray with the perfume, the different colours separate from each other and get some water spots.

Some notes: I used filtered water or rain water (Tried both and both worked fine) at about 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit). 

Also I changed the water every 2 nails as there was a build up of the perfume oil that was causing differences in the water spotting.

I used Britney Spears Curious perfume. I also tried 100% ethanol but this only created bubbles. I think the bottle I had it in created too fine of a mist which didn't penetrate the layer of polish. I put the 100% ethanol in a different bottle and had a little more success but I much preferred the look the perfume created. I do plan to try different ethanol concentrations in water to see if that makes a difference.

Update: I used Priceline Cosmetic Brush Cleaner to do this water sparble and it seemed to work pretty well. 

*I used perfume as I didn't have hand sanitizer and the 100% ethanol I had didn't work. In the future I might try diluting the ethanol to 70% and seeing how that goes (would be much cheaper).

Bloopers.... I originally used polystyrene cups. Apparently nail polish eats through polystyrene because when a drop of polish sunk to the bottom of the cup a few minutes later I had a flood to deal with!