Under The Sea – The 52-Week Art Project 2026

Welcome to another 52-Week Art Project recap! The prompt for week 31 is: Under The Sea. I’ll share my creations for the prompt below, as well as adding them to the gallery.

Feel free to add your ocean inspired creations to the gallery this week too!

If you’ve been thinking of joining in, but aren’t sure you can commit to creating every week for a whole year, please know that there’s no obligation to stick to it every week of the year. You may come and go as you feel inspired or able to. As somebody with a fluctuating chronic illness, I know that sometimes you just can’t manage things consistently. This project was made for us, it is for fun regular practice, but you can go at your own pace.

I’m going to try to share these weekly posts by Monday evenings. My aim is to post it on Sunday, but if the weekends become too busy, I’ll be a bit delayed. Weekends are usually when family comes over to visit or help me out with bigger jobs around the house and garden. So I won’t always have time or energy left to work on the blog on those weekends. But don’t let that stop you from uploading your creations!

The gallery is always available, so you can browse or, if you’re participating, upload your creations, anytime.

The gallery will also feature in all future posts as more people are starting to join now, so all participants as well as my readers can discover your art too. As always, click on images to zoom.

Project Overview

• A creative project or those of us who can’t create daily, for whatever reason.
• There is 1 prompt per week to ​interpret in any way & take your time with.
• Use any medium (collage, clay, paint, photography, baking, knitting, lego, fabric, etc)
• You can skip a prompt anytime if needed, your wellbeing comes first. No stress here.
• No social media accounts required, but if you share online, please use #CH52art
• Share your creations to the gallery & be inspired by others creations. (optional)
• I share my weekly creations and the updated gallery/link-party every Sunday.

Visit this page for more details.

Wk31 Prompt: Under The Sea

I really like this week’s prompt! Unfortunately I’ve only managed to finish one piece for the project this week. I started on a second one, but it’s far from finished. I might upload it later this week, if I get it done.

But that’s the beauty of this challenge: no stress, just do what you can. The goal is to create regularly, not meet unrealistic targets.

That said, I did actually paint another piece, unrelated to the #CH52art Project. So I’ll share that separately. It was just something I wanted to make, and you have to go where inspiration leads!

Coral Reef Inspired Art – Gouache

So for this week’s prompt, I wanted to have a go at painting a coral reef type of scene. I don’t think I’ve ever attempted that before, so I was excited to try it. I also wanted to use very wet pigments that run into each other since this is a seascape that is fully submerged.

This is also a technique that I don’t use very often despite the fact that I use gouache with water, much like watercolours, and that is one of the main features of those types of paints.

I really do like how it turned out and will be playing more with this technique going forward.

Please excuse the dull lighting on some of the photos, all of this art was done on my lap while reclined on the sofa. There was dim lighting most of the time as I’m keeping the blinds down to keep the sun out of the house (heatwave), and I use just 2 lamps in the house during the day to see what I’m doing. I sometimes put the ceiling light on to take a few pictures, but that light is so bright, it drains my energy (light sensitivity is an ME/CFS symptom). Somehow even that ceiling light makes everything look a bit greyish.

Creating The Background

I started by painting a light wash for the background, keeping away from the edges of the page. I’m used 300gsm cold-pressed watercolour paper, so it’s nice and textured.

Using lots of water, I applied blue to the top two thirds of the page and orange-brown to the bottom third.

I used an aquabrush for this whole painting since I was on the sofa again for this one. The aquabrush just allows me to have water contained in the barrel and depend less on dipping my brush in a jar of water, moving it back and forth constantly – that could be hazardous on the sofa!

Next, I started putting down some general shapes for rocks and coral structures. Changing the colour on my brush for each piece. I purposefully did not clean my brush between colours as I wanted the pallette to be cohesive.

When each colour contains a bit of the other colours in the same artwork, they match better. And, as I said before, I was also purposefully letting the wet colours bleed into each other. I’ll go back in later to add more definition and shading.

I used a variety of colours for the rocky structures. Orange, purple, blue, brown, and even a little green and magenta went in there.

For the corals I leaned more into the brighter shades of purple and teal along with the greens and oranges.

Adding Shadows To The Rocks

By adding darker shades of the same colours, it gives the illusion of shadows and adds depth to the painting. Now these shapes look more like rocks stacked on top of each other.

Deciding which direction the light is coming from in your scene also helps to place all the shadows in the right place. In this case I chose up and forward to be the light source, so the shadows fall towards us and aren’t too large as the light is coming from pretty high up, above the surface of the water.

I also made the shadows uneven as the water moves and reflects light, so this would affect the shadows too. This is how I justified painting very loosely for this piece. Usually I prefer much cleaner and defined lines. So this was fun to experiment with. Different.

Foreground Details: Sea Creatures

I then moved onto the foreground which was feeling very bare. I added a starfish and some sea urchins. Again only loosely painting the shapes, planning to go back and add details later.

Detail work needs to be done when the first layer of paint is dry, as these pigments will run into each other and mix when both are wet. You can’t get defined lines for detail work if painting wet on wet.

I’ve since done a bit of reading about sea urchins. They are fascinating creatures! I’ll probably be painting more in the future, I’d like to paint more of the spiky ones too. They also feature on the second “under the sea” painting I started this week.

While working in the foreground, I decided to add some shading to the rocks on the right side of this composition. Again, using darker shades of the same colours, keeping in mind where the light is coming from, I added shadows and texture to the rock shapes. I think it really made them pop. They look less flat now, more rounded and interesting.

Adding Definition & Details To The Corals

Returning to the left side, I added shadows to the existing corals and added some new ones too. I really like how the donut shaped ones turned out.

Initially I painted circles using the wet on wet technique with teal, blue and purple, making sure the circles touched, so they were very undefined and the colours bled into each other (above left).

By adding this dark blue-teal mix as a shadow, they are so much more defined (above right). I placed the shadows on the bottom of the outer coloured edge of each circle and on the top of the inner white space to define a more 3D donut shape.

Adding Texture & Details To The Sand

Moving back to the foreground, which would have been dry by now, I added details and shadows to the pile of urchins and painted little grains in the sand.

Unsure how to paint sand, I tried to add tiny dots of varying shades, sizes and depths, as well as some more defined shell shapes in the foreground. I can definitely improve this with more practice, but I don’t hate how it turned out.

So, after adding the final bits of shading here and there, the piece is finally finished.

Why Didn’t I Paint Any Fish?

I did consider painting something swimming in the water above, but this wide open emptiness actually reminded me of my last seaside holiday before I fell ill. We had taken a peddle boat out deep and snorkled in the open sea.

I was in awe, and a little terrified, at the sheer vastness of the ocean. Looking around, the empty body of water seemed to stretch out endlessly in every direction.

The spot we were in had no visible life. Just white sand deep below us, and empiness in every direction. The water was so clean and clear, but we could only see so far before the view became a blur in the distance.

I could just imagine some enormous sea creature appearing out of the nothingness…

Would You Like To Participate?

If you’d like to join us, you can hop in (and out) anytime you like. It’s a low stress project, so you can go at your own pace. Being chronically ill means sometimes I can make 3 pieces of art in a week and other times I will struggle to make one. There’s no pressure here. Life happens.

Next Prompt, Wk32: Sunset Silhouette

I’d love to see how you interpret this prompt. You can upload an image of your creations to the gallery using the button below, or just browse here:

The #CH52art Summer Gallery 2026

* If you are struggling to upload your image, feel free to send it to me and I’ll upload it for you.

* If you add a link to a social media post or online storage service where your creation has been uploaded, the widget should automatically load the photo from the URL you share.

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