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 broken inkjet 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...