Hi Goddesses
Welcome to Day 2 of OPI Week aka Crumpet playtime :) where I got to play with the OPIs I was sent for review - Suzi's Hungary Again, Vant To Bite My Neck and My Vampire Is Buff.
I have never mastered needle drag marbling, much as I have wanted to, and I ended up having a conversation about it with some of the goddesses from the Digit-al Dozen at the weekend. What you see here, is the experimenting I did to try and find my perfect needle drag technique.
Firstly, what is needle drag? Well, it's when you apply various blobs or stripes of wet polish to your nails and use a tool (usually a needle, hence the name) to "drag" the polish in various directions. You'll also see this referred to as tie dye nails, and when done well, it's really gorgeous.
Whenever I've tried it before, I've been unhappy. I've either ended up with gouges from where I've dug my needle in too hard, or just not got a pattern that's appealing.
In the end, the Digit-al Dozen came up with 3 techniques -
* Katee from A Girl and Her Polish uses a needle stuck into the end of a pencil with an eraser on it, to make a super long and fine dotting tool
* Sue from Creative Nail Design by Sue uses her thinnest dotting tool
* and Stephanie from Sincerely Stephanie uses a striping brush.
So can you guess which is which?
The index finger is the needle, and although it spread Suzi the best, I don't like the "wibble" effect with the shaky lines, or that the lines are so thin.
The middle finger is the thin dotting tool, and whilst I do like this, it left groove lines (as did the needle).
The thumb, ring and pinkie are using a size 0 nail art brush. Whilst this had a thinner tip than the dotting tool, the softer material creates softer nail art. The brush does get thick quite quickly though, so you need to keep wiping it to keep your lines thin.
For each nail I applied 2 coats of My Vampire Is Buff and top coat. The next day, I added a heavy stripe of each of the 3 polishes to each nail (make sure you only do 1 nail at a time) and then started playing.
So which is your favourite?
Enjoy - these polishes were sent to me for review and you can also buy these polishes HERE if you're in the UK.
Enjoy xx :)