Water Sparbling Again. Hoorah! It Was Meant to be Turquoise Stone...

This weekend I went along to my very first Perth Polish Posse (PPP?) meet up. Seeing as it was the first time they would be meeting me I was inspired to do something a bit more special on my nails- break out of the stamping slum that I've been in for a few weeks. Not that stamping isn't awesome.... it's just so easy to get a great look that when I'm being lazy I default to it.

I chose the most complicated technique I know of! Water marbling and water spotting (which I have dubbed water sparbling: tutorial here).

I wanted to do a turquoise stone look with some gold veins running throuhg and totally didn't nail it..

But.... it looks pretty interesting anyway

I struggled a lot trying to take pictures of this one. I ended up taking a total of 103 photos.  I think the one above is the best. 

I love love love that middle finger. It reminds me of a peacock feather. Water sparbling is so unpredictable!

 

The polishes that I used were:

Bright Teal: OPI fly

Black: Sally Hansen Xtreme wear in Black Out

Gold: Saly Hansen Xtreme Wear in Good as Gold

The metallic teal (this didn't show up much in the photos) is Revlon Ocean Breeze.

Do other people freak out about wasting there good polishes on a water marble? I never touch my OPIs or Essies for marbling!

This one (above) is the only close up shot I got of my right hand. You can see it got a few spotted bits on the ring finger. For the water spotting, this time I used a makeup brush cleaner spray that had alcohol in it (the Priceline pharmacy brand- incidentally.... don't buy this for cleaning makeup brushes- it hardly does anything!)

 Thanks for stopping by :)

Water Sparbling Part Two: A Walk Though The Garden

I managed to keep my last mani for one and a half days before giving into temptation and trying another water sparbling (water spotted crossed with water marbling nails) manicure. This is definitely one of my favourite manicures I've ever done!

 There was an abundance of pretty flowers in the backyard, and lots of them happened to match this manicure so I was inspired to get lots of pictures with them :) My boyfriend even helped out and used his fancy camera!! Amazing how much better the pictures are compared to iphone pictures (which I usually use). Unfortunately I don't think I could hold up the monster camera with one hand to take pictures by myself and I think taking macro shots might require some photography expertise.

Details:

The background polish is OPI Are We There Yet?

The marbled orange is China glaze Peachy Keen

The Marbled Gold is Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear Golden-i

Details on this technique can be found on this post : http://indianoceanpolish.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/water-marble-water-spotted-technique.html

My boyfriend kindly took this on his fancy camera. Much better than my iphone pictures! The flower is a banksia

I thought I should do a non-flower picture for close up purposes.

A pretty hibiscus

More of that Banksia- This is the other hand (Left). This is the first manicure I've ever done where I like the right hand better!

I haven't the foggiest idea what this flower thing is. My boyfriend found it when he was out walking. It's a little creepy looking!

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!