Underwater painting

Made some progress on the diver & mermaid diorama, with some first shades and an attempt at color:

I am not 100% sure about the colors, I think I will work towards a monochrome / analogous colorscheme instead,working more with blues and greens and a flash of orange somewhere.

Here are the bubbles. I like how these came out:

Some closeups of the scene:

Not only is the colorscheme an experiment, but the colors themselves are too. I took apart a friend's brokeninkjet printer, and it came with tanks of ink, which I dutifully siphoned out into dropper bottles:

These inks are super potent yet pretty translucent (that's how they function, after all). They seems to blend pretty well too, and they are super saturated.I don't think they dry entirely waterproof, but that is why we have varnish after all.

I'm going to try and find some more uses for them...