ILNP Holo Water Marble

My small collection of ILNP holo polishes is truly precious to me. They were my first introduction to holos, and it's still a joy to use them whenever I pull one out. I was feeling particularly holo-riffic on a recent sunny afternoon, so I decided to go FULL HOLO MANIA and spend a couple of hours creating an all-ILNP-holo water marble that would really sparkle in all that sun. (Have I said "holo" in this paragraph enough yet?)

I used ILNP Dreaming in Violet for my base color, and then use that one along with Kings & Queens, Fall Semester, and Cosmic Barney to do the actual water marble. Dreaming in Violet turned out to be the perfect base color: bold enough to stand out on its own, but light enough that the other three colors covered it without any issues.

As you can see, I still have the old style ILNP bottles. Vintage! The polish inside is still perfect, though.

My water marble technique is definitely still a work in progress, but I think I'm gradually improving. This time around I tried really hard to achieve the classic "flower petal" look that I see in a lot of water marbles, and I was actually mostly successful! (Don't ask me about the other hand—I was not nearly as fortunate over there, ahem.)

I never would have attempted a holo water marble before discovering my dear friend liquid latex. Covering your whole finger with it to the second knuckle (except for the nail, of course) before the marbling really only takes a minute, and it saves SO MANY MINUTES' worth of cleanup—and probably crying—that would otherwise result from all those tiny sparklies.

That one little out-of-place drip on my middle finger really, really bothered me, but alas. It adds character, right? I did learn an important (albeit probably obvious) lesson about not letting the latex snap back when you're trying to cut it off your finger, however...

Thanks for looking!