DIY Water Marbling Decal/Appliqué Tutorial

Hi guys,

I have another nail polish post for your today, these are so much easier to do than the sewing ones unfortunately, as they're much quicker. After getting a bit bored with my mani this week, I decided to add some water marbling accents. Unfortunately I didn't really like the finished result but I did catalogue the process so here goes.

I love the look of water marbling but detest the clean up and I also find the process wasteful considering only a few nails can be done with each design. To make the process a bit cleaner I make the water marble into a decal by sticking it to a bit of plastic and letting it dry, this allows me to pick the pieces I want. This avoids the mess as I'm working with dry polish. These are the polishes I worked with for the marbling;

Left to right: China Glaze Patent Leather Top Coat, OPI Need Sunglasses? and OPI A Roll In The Hague

After doing some marbling last year I concluded that China Glaze polishes worked the best for me. I only use tap water, none of this special stuff as I'm a bit lazy, that's why I used China Glaze as it spreads out well using tap water. However I tried out the OPIs and low and behold they spread out really nicely this time. So I'm not sure what's changed but I didn't do anything specific to the water. I wanted to add in the clear coat to leave gaps so you could see the manicure underneath and I tried to match the colour of the glitter from Lush Lacquer Orange You Sweet.

After picking out the colours I started building my bullseye (I won't be doing an indepth 'How To' for the marbling, other blogs already have that, for example Chloe's Nails does a really good one).

After building the bullseye I drag an orange stick through it to make the design. Once the design is done, I take a piece of cut up sandwich bag about the same size as the cup (I find that the plastic from these works really well as it's slightly thick but still flexible) and place the plastic, by the edge first, onto the design;

Once the plastic is on the design and the edges of the design are covered, you can lift the plastic up;

I then place the piece of plastic polish side up to dry somehwere. This usually takes an hour or so, but the up side is that you can prep them in advance or on a day where you want to play with polish but still dig your manicure (keep them in a sealed bag if you're going to leave them for more than a day). Once the polish is dry, cut off a strip that you like the width of your nail. To separate the polish from the plastic I cut into the bottom of the strip and kind of tear the plastic, this warps it allowing the polish to lift off. Then use tweezers to pry the rest of it off like so;

You can apply this straight to your nail and then top coat it, or for best results apply it to a nail that's been freshly coated but isn't 100% dry. I find even day old manis are still 'wet' enough for these to stick due to the static. Top coat the decal/applique and then your done! (sorry for the nubs but I'm rock climbing this weekend and you can't do that with long nails!).

I wasn't thrilled with the finished product as the colours don't match the glitter as well as I thought they would but the effect is nice.

If you have any questions about this method let me know in the comments and I'll try and help you out.

Thanks for reading and see you next time!

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