Tutorial: Gradient Water Marble

Hi everyone!

It’s Water Marble Wednesday and today I have a sort of tutorial for you. I decided to create a gradient water marble and share the steps with you. This is the final look:

During the 31 Day Challenge in September, I created this look in shades of blue. My blue version turned out a little better but I have still decided to show you the process for creating this version. If you’d like to see a quick video, I will be sharing one on my Instagram account later today.

First up, here’s a summary of the steps:

Now for a more detailed breakdown:

The first step is to give your nails a base coat – sorry for the lousy picture of this one. In this case, I went with a coat of the lightest green I’d be using (Essence Hello Spring!). As you can see, at one coat it looks a little patchy. That doesn’t matter because the base is only intended to help the marble look opaque and it doesn’t need to look perfect. In a case like this where one of the colours in the marble is very light, I will use it for my base. Otherwise, I will usually use white for my base. My next step is to tape around my nails in order to make clean-up a little easier. You will need to do some clean-up anyway, so there is no need to be precise with the tape, just place it more or less around your nails.You will have to excuse my blurry picture – this is the first time I have tried taking pictures of my process, so I still need to learn a bit.

For the actual water marble, I use an ordinary old glass and fill it with water. As you can see by the ring of dried polish around the edge, it has been used for many marbles! I knew that I did not want my lightest colour to spread all the way to the edges of the glass, or the stripes of my gradient would become too broad to fit on a single nail. Instead, I started with a few drops of Sally Hansen Parrot to contain the rest of the rings. I then created my bullseye by dripping in the polishes I was using from lightest to darkest: Essence Hello Spring!, Sally Hansen Parrot, Sinful Colors Hey, You!, Essence Beijos de Brazil, Essie Pretty Edgy, Essence The Green & The Grunge, and Essence Magnetics Majestic Green. This is possibly the easiest type of water marble to try, because once the bullseye is created, there is no worrying about creating a pattern and swirling the polishes around. Instead, just select the part you think looks best, carefully line up your nail, and dip it in. Once you’ve done all your nails, it’ll be very clear why you taped them up before the time. The polish gets everywhere. Peel the tape off and you will still have plenty of cleanup to do. I like to topcoat before I clean up, both to protect the actual marble from being smeared by nail polish remover and in case I go skew with the top coat. Finally, I clean up any stray polish with a flat brush dipped in nail polish remover. Voila! These came out with a couple of little ‘mistakes’ (the string of lighter polish across my index finger being the main one) – mostly because it’s hard to take pictures or video while you are busy doing the nails! But overall I am happy with them. What do you think? Is this a look you would try?

Since this was my first tutorial, I’d also love to hear your thoughts on the tutorial itself. I know my pictures during the process were poor quality, and I’ll work on that in the future. Did you like seeing a step by step tutorial for this look? Were the steps I gave helpful? Are there any other specific looks you’d like to see tutorials for? Please leave a comment and let me know!