6 Lessons Learned From Water Marbling

We finished the water marble keyboard video (it’ll go live in a few days) but there were SO many lessons learned that we wanted to share them with you guys in case anyone else wants to try this! Admittedly, it’ll make more sense after you watch the video so you might wanna revisit this on Friday if you’re interested in the tips, but we thought we’d go ahead and upload it early!

Here’s an outline:

• Top Lessons Learned
  • 1) Choose and prepare your dip container
    • Choose a bucket that is just a bit bigger than what you'll be dipping, otherwise you'll be wasting nail polish
    • There is a max size for nail polish water marble because it starts drying too fast. The small bin we used was about 14” by 10” in terms of the surface area of the water
    • Fill it with “room temperature” water or colder. I would err on the side of cold water. Just fill it up with whatever the coldest you have is, no warm. Our “room temperature water” was about 78°F (about 25.5°C), and my really cold water was 50°F (10°C)
    • We kept our container clear so viewers could see in but you can add a trash bag or any liner you want for easier cleanup
  • 2) Prepare your keys (or whatever you want to dip)
    • You’ll want some way to hold the pieces so that you can manipulate them without actually touching the surfaces you’ll be dipping. Attaching them to an intermediate object you are OK with getting messy works well. (For our keycaps we just stuck them onto some key switches that were hot glued to a board. For the keyboard case, we rigged up something with filming gear covered in blue tape)
    • Sanding helps it adhere
  • 3) Prepare your nail polish
    • We did 5ml for our 9 key dips, 10ml for our full inner keys dip
    • Dirty pours are a faster more reliable way to get interesting patterns (and time is always running out)
    • Alternating light and dark colors adds more contrast to your dirty pour
  • 4) Pour and manipulate nail polish
    • Pour from as low as possible
    • You should immediately see a “bloom” spread out. Don’t pour outside of that bloom, keep it all together
    • Pull the bloom from the inside of the edge, out
    • Do your squiggles or any manipulation of the polish without lifting the squiggle tool if possible because that can add bubbles or other unwanted imperfections
    • The nail polish should look somewhat translucent. If it’s solid looking than it is too thick
  • 5) Dip object into nail polish
    • Go at a really slow and controlled speed (this is something I didn’t start doing till later)
    • Dip in a way that the water can flow easily over the object (so avoid dipping a flat face in)
    • Once it is fully submerged, don’t linger and don’t shake the object while underwater
  • 6) Let it dry
    • Setting it out in the sun greatly decreased drying time and it seemed to reduce the amount of water spots that were left onto the design