NOTD - Dry Marble Lily Nail Art

Hi there lovely readers!

Now I have me my fair share of nail art FAILS. Dreadful & dark times indeed when these events occur let me tell you. Times that are frequenting more of late, mostly (okay entirely) due to a certain cheeky little fluffball...if you follow me on social media (Twitter @aysh_tmb/Instagram @aysh_xox) you'll know that we now have a new addition to the family in the form of Lunar, our new kitten! Needless to say we all miss our beloved Hoshi muchly, so we all needed to have that gaping hole she left behind filled with another sweet soul to cherish & Lunar certainly is that. Even at a young age I can see she is such a character & its been an eventful couple of weeks! Lets just say nail painting when I'm at home is gonna be a whole new challenge!

However, pardon my digression there, I do occasionally have moments when (if I'm not being distracted by a curious little kitty) a design turns out far beyond my expectations & then the world is put to rights again...life is all about balance eh? Though to be fair I could do WITHOUT the fails that see me losing my hair & ageing at a more drastic rate...

Anyhoo mani WINS are much more welcome naturally & such is the case with today's design which features what is becoming one of my favourite nail art techniques...dry marbling. Until the day comes when I find the inner mental & emotional strength to even think about tackling the intimidating task that is water marbling...I shall get all my marble fix needs met this way!

Dry marbling in case you're not familiar is basically the swirling of 2 or more colours on the nail, but not overly mixing so that you lose each colour, thus creating a a pretty marble effect. I was in the mood for a spot of marble & picked three vibrant colours in the hope of creating something pretty & what I ended up with was something so unexpected that I think I got quite emotional.

Whilst I was halfway through doing my nails I became aware that the specific way I was marbling my nails actually ended up creating a design rather reminiscent to one of my favourite flowers...Lilies! MIND BLOWN.

I follow a hell of a lot of ridiculously talented nail artists on Instagram & one lady whose IG I've recently become addicted to is @yorkbeauty who has taken dry marbling skills to another level! Honestly check her out, watching her mini videos on how she creates marble magic on her nails is just mesmerizing. The girl is GIFTED.

I didn't get a chance to capture each stage for a step by step pictorial as to be honest I didn't actually expect this design to come out any good, but also when dry marbling you have to work pretty quickly making it quite difficult to capture. But I will definitely try to do so next time but until then I will just do my best to explain to you how I create this Lily flower effect

To begin apply one coat of your base colour to all your nails. Here I've used a stunning jewel purple shimmer from Models Own, Roxy. Really a gem of a shade, so so pretty!

Now this is where you need to work a bit quicker & its best to complete one nail at a time before moving on. Apply a second coat of your purple polish or whichever base colour you've gone for. Then grabbing a white polish, apply a strip of white in the centre of the nail, not covering the purple completely. 

Then grabbing your 3rd shade, I opted for another beautiful jewel colour in the form of this stunning pink glass fleck shimmer by a random European brand I must've picked up on my travels that alas has no name, what a tragedy for such a beaut. Grabbing the brush I added a dot of this pink into the centre of the wet white polish.

Now using my fine nail art brush, you can also use a toothpick but I find using a softer tool easier, I started from the top end of the nail, near the cuticle & began bringing the polish from the edges in to the centre, using the brush, repeating this motion around the whole edge.

Then to create the look of petals, each time I brought the polish in,creating a circular petal, I then swirled the centre of this petal outwards which will create that pointed petal look associated with lilies. 

The beauty of this technique is that it doesn't have to be perfect, in fact the more rustic the better I say!

For a bit of extra detail I added on a few small dots to the centres of my lilies. After completing all the nails I then applied a coat of topcoat to finish.

I'm not gonna lie...this mani took blooming AGES to dry, even with the fast dry topcoat. This is naturally due to the fact that you have quite a few layers going on there. But if the finished look is this pretty... I can muster a bit of patience ;)

Thanks for reading as always lovelies, hope you liked this design as much as I did! Its got me itching to experiment more with different swirling techniques to see what crazy fun designs can be created!

Lotsa love to ya!