Nail-aween Challenge 1: Water Marble

Howdy!  As promised, I have my first Nail-aween Nail Art Challenge challenge for you today.  Wow, that was a mouthful!  The first challenge is a water marble.  Everyone loves how water marbles look and everyone hates doing them.  The technique is time-consuming, polish-consuming, and sanity-consuming.  So I cheated.  Here's a photo:

*more after the jump*

 
Still looks like a water marble, doesn't it?  I started with 2 coats of Sunny Side Up from Wet 'n' Wild's Wild Shine line.  I made faux water marble decals by dripping polish onto a saran wrapped surface and swirling the colors, similar to how a real water marble looks.  I let them dry and then applied them to my nails while the base color was still tacky.  Seriously, I may never do another actual water marble again.  The faux technique is so much cleaner, doesn't waste near as much polish and it looks just about the same.  The colors I used here were Sunny Side Up again, Wet 'n' Wild French White Creme and Sonia Kashuk Rock Star.  Rock Star is actually a dark purple, but I think it came out more black in the photos.  I'm kicking myself for not getting up early enough to finish this mani this morning so I could get photos in the sun.  What can I say? I'm a night owl!

You can see I had some smudging issues.  I went back in with a dotting tool and Sunny Side Up to add some details and I'm not sure when it happened, but I smudged.  Overall, I think this was pretty successful.   One more look:

If you're interested, you can check out the other challenge participants here, drop by and show them some love! Here's another look at the prompts for this challenge:

I'm really excited about the 2nd challenge, I've never done a Matte Doticure before.  Check back soon to see if I can pull it off!  Thanks for reading!