Try, Try, Try Again.

That's the only way to learn, isn't it?
I'll probably do 499 terrible water marbles, but if the 500th attempt is the one, so be it.

Again went for more of an accent nail because that's just the visual aesthetic I prefer.


Colours used;
NYC, '003 Prey of Grey'
Bodique, '07 Red Love'
Hema, '809' (nail art striper)

Practice, Persistence, Perseverence.

Oh no! I found out this gray
had a little bit of an accident...

Or, alternatively, "I refuse to suck at this". I speak of course, of the nail art style that kicked my butt which was water marbling. The one that got away. My white whale, if you will.
I've complained about it on my previous post about water marbling, and one of my issues with the method stemmed from the frustrations of a lot of polishes not lending themselves to the technique (they wouldn't spread in the water properly). The post reads as pretty bitter.
In my practice runs I had thrown polishes together not really realising not all of them would simply work well together no matter how much one tried to telepathically will them to. I concluded that what I therefor lacked was knowledge.

And that knowledge would only come from testing and trying what works and what doesn't.

Testing in progress.

I'd decided to create a little database (read: list) for myself to work with the problem I had of not knowing what colours I had to work with that would lend themselves to marbling. So that in the future, I would know what I could grab that would work just fine and not have to deal with the disappointment of "oh, x and y would look great together!" only to realise those polishes had other ideas.
To limit wasting a bunch of nail polish on experiments, I mostly used my white nail art stripers (they do spread) that I don't use much, and paired them with the colour I wanted to try.

In italics means 'will spread, but not great'.

So, here is what I have so far. I was surprised to find that the will spreads outnumbered the will nots.
Unfortunately I still don't really have a large pool to choose from but if I just test some polishes every now and then I'll expand it quickly enough.

Back to Paradise.

When your nail polish collection reaches a certain size, it's an inevitability that there are going to be polishes that somehow fall between the cracks that you forget about completely.

Essence's 'Return to Paradise' collection was one that came out in 2010 and featured a bunch of nice summer-appropriate bright colours.
And also this dark green, which is the only thing of the collection I have. No surprises there, I suppose.
It's '03 Back to Paradise'.

I might arrogantly describe myself a connoisseur of green nail polishes since it's the colour I wear most, and though this one has one big fault, I do think it's a gorgeous colour and am willing to look past it. 
Unfortunately it's pretty sheer, and will need at least three coats to cover. I daresay (as usual) that this may be a less obvious deficit on a shorter nail but even then it just doesn't cover all that evenly. It becomes more obvious when one looks at it under different light - 

Flash - Artificial light.

 
Though sheerness is usually my biggest pet peeve, it doesn't seem to bother me all too much with this polish. I don't know if it's because I just enjoy the colour that much or something else but either way it was a nice rediscovery. A coat or so extra won't really kill me, after all.

You win some, you lose some.

Left:  '90 - Dark Lavender'
Right:  '130 – Black Burgundy'

I have these two older Catrice polishes. A friend had borrowed one of them, and its return made me want to try it on again as well. Since I owned two of them, I wore them in succession.

Dark Lavender really positively surprised me. I've had these polishes for so long I don't know if I've ever worn them before let alone how the application was, and despite its age it had no problems whatsoever. It covered very well in two coats and dried fairly quickly. I also really like this shade of purple.

Flash  -  Artificial light.

Its redder cousin, Black Burgundy seems to have fared less well over the years. It had gone rather stringy and goopy, left bumps in the polish and started chipping pretty quickly. I'm hoping some nail polish thinner will return this to a state of usability, because it's a nice deep red colour I wouldn't mind using if the formula behaved.

Flash. (Artificial light photo unfortunately turned out very blurry, sorry!)