Dive In...
My original idea was to have the entire room be a huge "aquarium", an immersive oceanic experience (and fish are ridiculously easy to do, even for beginners: bright colors, simple shapes, and, unlike humans, we don't look at them every day, so if they are a bit off, we don't notice as quickly).
Our idea grew to include multiple environments and animals. We kept one wall as ocean. I did the orca, and the lady at left did the rest of the fishy subjects.
We began drawing on the white wall, so we couldn't use rollers to create the water color. We might have rolled on the ocean color first, then drew the fish and whales. I used sponges (and some brushwork with large brushes) to blend the green down into the dark blue (dabbing with sponges, stroking with sponges, stabbing with brushes, stroking with brushes). The texture of the concrete block walls made it harder to getr decent strokes; sponges worked very well here. We had a gallon of a dark, almost Prussian blue (greenish) and a leafy green. Quite authentic for some waters (especially the mid-Atlantic where I've actually dived), though not the cheerful Caribbean blue you might want to paint your own walls. The dark ocean wall here balances the pale arctic wall and the very green/brown walls containing the jungle, swamp and zebra. Note how the green ties in with the other walls. The white window frame splashes (sponge-dabs of white paint) into the blue ocean.
What to do with the corners? The blue/green trails into the jungle (jaguars, elephant, chimp) wall nicely. In the other corner, I let the green ocean spill around the corner and become leaves that the snake (wrapped around a bothersome window) is climbing out of. That was all too GREEN so I added bright flowers (it also makes the giant snake a bit more friendly for small kids... the snake is also slightly cartoony, though he was inspired by my love of Mowgli's guru, Kaa, the 30 foot python, in Kipling's "Jungle Books"). I left the background white... on the other side of the door is the arctic landscape; the entire wall there is white, the snake becomes a transition between the dark blue/greens of the ocean and the whites of the arctic. An alternative idea was to have a wave spilling onto a beach, with its attendant littoral zone critters.
Click on the photos for larger size...
Our idea grew to include multiple environments and animals. We kept one wall as ocean. I did the orca, and the lady at left did the rest of the fishy subjects.
We began drawing on the white wall, so we couldn't use rollers to create the water color. We might have rolled on the ocean color first, then drew the fish and whales. I used sponges (and some brushwork with large brushes) to blend the green down into the dark blue (dabbing with sponges, stroking with sponges, stabbing with brushes, stroking with brushes). The texture of the concrete block walls made it harder to getr decent strokes; sponges worked very well here. We had a gallon of a dark, almost Prussian blue (greenish) and a leafy green. Quite authentic for some waters (especially the mid-Atlantic where I've actually dived), though not the cheerful Caribbean blue you might want to paint your own walls. The dark ocean wall here balances the pale arctic wall and the very green/brown walls containing the jungle, swamp and zebra. Note how the green ties in with the other walls. The white window frame splashes (sponge-dabs of white paint) into the blue ocean.
What to do with the corners? The blue/green trails into the jungle (jaguars, elephant, chimp) wall nicely. In the other corner, I let the green ocean spill around the corner and become leaves that the snake (wrapped around a bothersome window) is climbing out of. That was all too GREEN so I added bright flowers (it also makes the giant snake a bit more friendly for small kids... the snake is also slightly cartoony, though he was inspired by my love of Mowgli's guru, Kaa, the 30 foot python, in Kipling's "Jungle Books"). I left the background white... on the other side of the door is the arctic landscape; the entire wall there is white, the snake becomes a transition between the dark blue/greens of the ocean and the whites of the arctic. An alternative idea was to have a wave spilling onto a beach, with its attendant littoral zone critters.
Click on the photos for larger size...
