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underwater mural, how to paint an underater mural, DIY underwater mural
How to paint an underwater effect- Part 1

Okay&so you have this really cute idea! Painting a faux ocean or an underwater mural with fish and coral for the bath&or maybe in the new baby room. How cute is that?

Now& do you need to hire a professional Mural Painter to create this one of a kind Underwater Mural for your home? Maybe&but you could try it yourself. It isn't difficult when you break down the steps to get beautiful results.

Over the years, I have painted so many underwater style murals&I think I get seasick just thinking about them. I did find that they can be time consuming and I needed to speed up the process. I still wanted to provide quality work to my customers, with each project having a one of a kind "feel". So how did I accomplish this technique? I thought you would never ask.

The first step in creating an underwater mural will use the gradient technique I taught this in a previous article&go check out instructions for blending paint colors.

The water (colors) must be blended onto the wall.
So&what type and color of paint is already on your wall?
Is it white (off-white is okay) or baby blue?
Is it satin or eggshell ( semi-gloss for bathrooms)?
If not& you have some work to do.
Is your wall textured?
This paint finish will work on a textured wall&but it will take some extra work to get a perfect water effect.

Underwater Mural - Two Ways to Get Water Effects

1. Use latex house paints.
This allows for quick dry time& so you can get started on the rest of the mural.

Materials:

• Paint - I am not going into qty..or even specific colors here. Qty would be based on the size of the room and paint coverage. Colors are NOT sky blue. Choose marine blue - like the color of blue tarps for boats. That will be your darkest blue color.
  The blue should be enough to cover 2/3 of your room -give or take. Then you're going to need white& at least enough to cover 1/3 of the room.
  
  
• 1" or 1 1/2" Chip Brush and a 1/2" artist brush
• Mini Paint Roller
• Extra cubs or cans to mix paint and a mixing stick
  

The top 5" -8" (to taste - like salting your food ) Paint almost pure white. Mix in a touch of blue to some of the white and paint this "stripe". The next layer that blends in is a mixture of more blue with the white. And so on until you have the deepest blue without any white added on your wall. I like to have this pure blue almost 2/3 of the way up the wall.

The effect you are trying to achieve is that deep water gets darker towards the bottom.

This isn't my favorite way of painting water&but it is pretty easy to get a pretty result.

You can see by the image above&that the color is never baby blue. It is always a marine blue. If you find when you add white to the blue paint, you are getting a baby color&you got the wrong blue.

The next underwater mural painting technique is really cool. It sounds and looks much harder than it is. If you master this technique you will be using for many other types of murals¬ just the underwater mural.

Part 2