Candy Cane Inspired Nail Art

I have been working my way through some Christmas designs and have been really pleased with the results so far!

I think this week's are my favourite that I have done though.  I was thinking of Christmas things that could inspire my nail art and I decided that candy canes would look fab.  Rather than go for red and white stripes I wanted to take a different approach.

 

 

This design was very easy to create, but very messy with watermarbling!  I painted three of my nails in Bright Red by Barry M and added my Collection 2000 sparkle top coat.  I love the top coat because the glitter is so fine but so pretty.

 

I painted my ring finger and thumb with a base of  white polish, I used Sally Hansen.  Leave this to dry and then comes the messy part.  To do water marbling you need a cup of room temperature water and your polishes.  New polishes work best.  You can use as many colours as you like, but you need to work quite quickly.  Drip your first polish on the surface of the water, I let a few drips fall to make sure I had enough.  The polish will start to spread out on the surface of the water.  Then add some drips of your other colour.  Then taking a tooth pick draw some swirls or stripes into the polish on the surface of the water.  When you are ready bend your finger placing the nail directly down onto your swirled polish, then straighten your finger straight down into the water.  You will see that there is polish still on the surface of the water.  Before removing your finger you need to get rid of the polish from the surface otherwise you will ruin your design.  Blow gently on the polish on the polish on the water, then using your tooth pick swirl it around on the surface and the polish will start to stick to the tooth pick.  Once the polish has gone from the surface of the water you can carefully remove your finger from the water.  You will have a lot of polish all around your nail and on your finger, which can look a bit scary, but all it takes is a cotton bud dipped into nail polish remover to take it off.  To help with this you can also use Vaseline around your nail and on your finger to stop the polish sticking so much.

 

Repeat those same steps for each watermarbled nail and voila - you have candy cane inspired nails!  I finished these nails off, once they were dry and cleaned up, with a coat of the sparkle top coat.  What's great about watermarbling is that no two nails look the same so you never really know what you might get.

 

I hope you like them and maybe try out watermarbling yourself.  If you get stuck there are loads of videos on YouTube that will help you out.