How to Marble With Nail Polish
(This post contains affiliate links. Thank you so much for your support!)
Um. Yeah. Aren't the results AMAZING? And they're made just using nail polish and water! We had fun choosing colors, swirling them around, and creating these lovely, colorful works of gorgeous art. Wanna see how we made them? Keep on reading!
Materials Needed to Marble with Nail Polish
- New bottles of Nail Polish
*
- Room Temperature water in a pan (that's deep enough for your item to be submerged in) (We used a disposable baking pan
- Scrap paper (To cover your work area)
- Watercolor Paper
- Disposable Gloves
- Toothpicks
- Popsicle Stick
*Some nail polishes gave us better marbling effects than others. Read below to see what we found.
DIY Marbling with Nail Polish
1. Cover your work area. Make sure you work in a well ventilated room. (This was REALLY important because the nail polish fumes were fairly strong. I developed a bit of a headache afterwards.)
2. Pour your room temperature water into your pan. Make sure that the water is deep enough to submerge your item. (We just used a disposable baking pan because we were just marbling watercolor paper.)
Warm water also seemed to work better than cold.3. Optional: Put on disposable gloves so that the nail polish won't stain your hands. Or, you can always use nail polish remover
to clean your hands later.4. Now comes the fun part. Choose nail polish colors that would go well together. Open your bottles.
5. Do these next steps quickly to get the best results.
- Quickly pour your colors into the water starting from lighter colors to darker colors.
- Note: We tried several different types of nail polish. Sparkly polishes just didn't work. They stayed clumped together in the water. Our new Sephora nail polishes seemed to work the best, providing vibrant colors that spread around nicely in the water. An older jar of Essie nail polish also just remained clumped in the water. I'm not sure why we got these results, but I'm guessing that it had something to do with how old the nail polishes were and how quickly they dried. The newer bottles of non-sparkly nail polish seemed to work the best.
- Take your toothpick and quickly swirl the colors around.
- Quickly dunk your watercolor paper into the water and pull it out.
6. Use your popsicle stick to remove any excess nail polish that's floating around in your water.
And if you should get results like this:
Or this:
7. Place your DIY masterpieces and place them on scrap paper to dry. Then you'll have your very own collection of lovely marbled papers.
Which one is your favorite? I had a tough time deciding.
*Happy Sigh* I was so worried that this project would turn out to be a dud, because I had previously tried marbling with nail polish and gotten horrible results. Everything was goppy looking. But looking back I think it's because I was using pretty old nail polish. We used very new bottles of Sephora nail polishes and got some really vibrant results. The best part about this project is that my niece really enjoyed herself too. I don't normally craft with older children, so I was glad that we both had fun. She ended up wanting to keep all the pieces of paper, which made me feel very happy.
More Marbled Crafts
Check out these fun marbling projects below:- Babble Dabble Do's Milk Painting Project
- Marbling with Shaving Cream
- Marbling Shell Necklaces
Or, if you're looking for other fun projects for elementary girls, here are some of my faves below: