Get Lucky Nail Art Challenge Day 1: Shades of Green

I saw a St. Patrick's Day nail challenge a few days ago and I decided to take part. The first day was shades of green. I decided to try my hand at marbling again. I had tried it before but had a LOT of fails. I read about a technique called dry water marbling, where you do a similar thing, but instead of putting your nail in the water, you put a piece of plastic baggy, take it out, let it dry, and transfer it onto your nails. I started doing that last night because I couldn't sleep.  I learned some valuable lessons trying this manicure. It failed a little bit, but I've definitely improved and learned how to do it better next time. Here's my finished nails and then I'll show the process.

 First fill a cup with water. I learned this time that it needs to be purified water at room temperature. I've also learned that you can't use a styrofoam bowl because I used that last night and was wondering why it took so much water. When I emptied the water, I found that a few nail polish drops had gone to the bottom and corroted holes in it! Good thing I had a towel underneath it!

Once you have you have your cup with water, alternate nail polishes that you want to marble. In this case, I did different shades of green. The one that looks blue is actually a blue/green but looks blue next to the others. I didn't use it in my end up using it for my final nails.

 

Then swirl the colours with a toothpick. Be careful to not lift up the toothpick too much as that results in it collecting nail polish and getting messy and clumpy when you put it back.

These are some finished ones. I decided to use black as my first colour because it made the other colours pop. They were too dull without the black.

Then cut the correct part that you want to add to your nail. Make sure that it is the right size. Mine were big enough, but I had other problems.

 Here's the first finger I did, my right thumb. It actually looked good and I was really optimistic.

My index finger didn't turn out too well as there wasn't much of the bright green. Here's the process on my middle finger.

 It looked pretty good, too. However, the other nails all seemed to fail. I decided to just try doing a regular water marble on them since it seemed like I was having more luck with the marbling that I did last time.

Here's my nails after dipping them. I decided to dip all of my nails at once in order to waste less nail polish. They were hard to clean and in retrospect, I should have gone to get that Vaseline out of the bathroom. I was just too lazy, but it really does work like magic, as I found out the first time that I tried to marble.

Here's another picture of the final product. They're messier than usual, but I wanted to make sure that I finished this post before heading off to the U of Michigan hockey game with my dad.

EDIT: I forgot to add the polishes I used...

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