Water Marbling, my new foe

Greetings Children of the Night and a big hello to my new followers! Thanks for reading.

As I'm sure most bloggers are, I'm a junkie for other blogs. Eventually I'll get around to posting some of my favorites on here. I've been seeing a lot of buzz lately for water marbling. It seems to be the new 'it' thing on nail blogs everywhere. I read up on it, watched *tons*of YouTube videos and thought to myself, "hey self, that is a really cool effect and looks really easy. Let's try it!" So I did. *snorts* Easy it is not!

  I figured I would do peacock colors. I picked out a dark navy chrome, a purple shimmer, creme teal, shimmering green, and a really pretty deep metallic gold. I used many different brands (maybe that was my problem?) but it was the Finger Paints that refused to spread. My water may have been *slightly* too warm.

Left (non-dominate) hand

I love the way my pinky came out here. You can really see the green and gold.  Even the thumb looks OK.

left thumb

My polish wouldn't spread, it dried way too fast and then I ended up with some really muddy marbling.On this hand though, you can see all the muddy-ness and the air bubbles. Again though, the ring finger and pinky came out pretty good.

right hand

right hand

Over all, it came out *ok* for a first attempt. I'm not giving up though. I will win! *brandishing fist* Ahem, yeah enough of that. Have any of you tried water marbling? How did yours come out?

Taxi Cab? Not quite

Greetings Cildren of the Night!

It seems I finally have my feet under me again and can get back to posting on a semi-regular basis.

I went to Target recently and found two pretties that my mother bought me (thanks Mom!) and they were under a dollar each! In my excitement just to see them on the nail I actually swatched them in the car (I had one bare nail. I had lost an acrylic earlier in the day) and I loved the combo so much I ended up doing all of my nails with it. As you can see I also lost the rest of the acrylics. I'm really glad they look as nice as they do in the pictures. I was a bit concerned by nail nubs wouldn't photograph as well.I'm also aware my cuticles look like crap. Those nails just ruined my cuticles.

I am the princess of cheap polish; one of my favorite brands is Sinful Colors, yet I hadn't really tried NYC. This is NYC Taxi Yellow Creme (114) with  NYC Starry Silver Glitter (105). Eventually I'll swatch Taxi Yellow Creme by itself, but the pretty glitter hid all of the flaws in the yellow.

All these pictures are one coat of Nail Life Gripper, 4 (yes 4) coats of Taxi Yellow Creme, 2 coats of Starry Silver Glitter, and one coat of Sally Hanson Super Shiny. This was not a very thirsty glitter. One thick coat and there wasn't a bump in sight.

Shade

Sun

Flash

I love Starry Silver Glitter. It is really really sparse though, so it's definitely a layering color. I don't event *want* to think about how many layers it would take to make this color opaque. It is a silver micro glitter in a clear base with lavender and blue hex glitter. In the bottle it is so pretty. All that silver glitter just flashes a rainbow of beautiful colors. On the nail however, it loses that rainbow quality. In the bottle you really don't see the two colors of hex glitter. That was a really pleasant surprise.

Failed Macro

Now that I have my natural nails back I thought I would play with the macro settings on the camera. Come to find out, I have *no* idea how they work. :-/ I also don't know where the manual is so I'll be experimenting for awhile.

I'm thinking about starting the 31 day nail challenge. I saw Nails and Noms do it and I'm very inspired. Honestly, I was just waiting to add a yellow to my collection. I generally don't wear yellow. With my skin tone, it looks like I'm going through liver failure. What do y'all think? Think I should try?