Much prettier don't you think? It's much easier to be able to take your time to choose the best part of the design to transfer on your nail then to rush to dip your finger into water.
Okay, so here's how to do dry water marbling:
1. Get a cup of room temperature water. Also, you'll want to use a disposable cup or a cup that you no longer want to drink from. While waiting for the water to adjust to room temperature, you can go ahead and choose the colours you want to use. I chose Color Club Take Me To Your Chateau, Orly Snowcone and china Glaze First Mate. These are all pretty opaque polishes and using cremes instead of jelly finishes will help get the colour of the polish to come out more. Also you might want to work on some waterproof surface just in case, or on top of newspapers so you won't damage your table top. I chose to work on a plastic file!
It's very important for the water to be of room temperature so I suggest you leave the cup in the room for at least fifteen minutes before doing anything else. If the water is too cold or too hot, the polish just won't spread out and will end up looking like this.
2. Now you can proceed to drop polish into the middle of the cup so they spread out in concentric circles. Do unscrew the caps of each polish before starting the dropping process. The polish will dry pretty quickly so you want to work fast. I also like placing my bottles behind the cup like so, to make the dropping process smoother for me.
After you've dropped enough polish, you can proceed to swirl the design you want. Try to anchor the polish before swirling. To do so, simply use a toothpick and drag the outermost circle to the rim of the cup.
I anchored it to about 10 points. Doing so will ensure the polish won't move about in the cup while you create your design.
Also, when swirling your design, try not the start swirling from the outermost circle. I started from the second outermost circle. You can create any design you want but what I did was to drag the polish from outside circle into the middle, creating a flower and then from the middle of each retal, I dragged the polish outwards, and I ended up with this design:
These three articles contain a lot of useful tips and tricks for wet water marbling as well as the creation of the swirls so you might want to read them!
3. Now comes the fun part! After you've swirled the design, dip a small piece of plastic into the cup at an angle. You want to use a ziplock bag and cut it into small pieces. I tried using the plastic wrapper for wrapping books and that didn't work out well. This one shown below was prepared beforehand (wow, that sounded like some cooking show line) because by the time I took pictures of the swirling and final water marble design above, the polish had dried and could not be transferred.
You want to wait for the polish to dry before transferring it onto your nail. I waited a couple of hours.
4. The best part about dry water marbling is that you can choose which is the nicest part of the design to transfer onto your nail. Also, because you can cut out smaller pieces of plastic from the original piece, you can get a couple of nail's worth of transfer pieces from one water marble, compared your how I'd normally dip one finger into one water marble som this saves polish too!
To transfer, cut out the desired area you wish to transfer. I painted my nails with one coat of Take Me To Your Chateau before transferring so the colours of the marbling will pop more. Only stick the plastic onto the nail when the polish is tacky and not wet. This is crucial for the polish to transfer properly. How I determine if the polish is just right is that it feels dry to a light touch but you can still leave fingerprints if you press a little harder. It's hard to explain so you really have to experiment abit to get the right feel. I didn't take any pictures for this step but you can refer to this article for more information.
After pressing the plastic onto the nail firmly, what I did was to use a toothpick and dragged in along my cuticle lines until I saw the polish "break". This might hurt a little but it's worth it then at least I know that there'll be a clean rip from the plastic! Now, you need to trust me when I say you need to rip the plastic off your nail like how you'd wax your legs.
After that, wait for the marble to settle in and dry a little before painting on a later of top coat to seal everything in.
AND THAT'S IT!
I like dry marbling much better than wet marbling. Much neater and you can take your time to get it perfect!
