I love diving, so painting underwater scenes is a way to document the underwater landscape and the diffused half-light of the depths, where red light fades to black (at 30 meters, a red button often looks grey green and a rich scarlet looks black).

It took me a lot of practice get this scene - first I realised that my Cobalt was, in fact, Cobalt Deep, which has a slight violet hue and needed to blended with Cobalt Turquoise to dull out the red. I also struggled to pick up a enough paint on my Princeton Aqua Elite 1 1/2 in brush to get smooth strokes - I have ordered the type of pallet shown in the class, which might help. I also struggled with colour gradation - in the end I blended Cobalt Turquise and Cobolt Deep for the top and bottom bands of colour to give the piece coherence, and painted a layer of indigo over the blend to help it fade into the lighter colours, with a band of darker colour added into the centre to give greater contrast. 

I cracked the sea bed when I stopped trying to make shapes that led towards the vanishing point - it was the white space between that creates the perspective and, with that realisation, everything clicked into place.

The metallic jellyfish was added for two reasons - one is that it made the composition more complete, which made the class more satisfying. The other was that my friends son is just moving into his own bedroom for the first time and loves all things pelagic, so the glittery-jelly will make a great house-warming gift.