The decision was made to have the

 octopus a little more unfurled.  Of course you've gotta paint white down to make almost anything

else opaque or you'd see the dark coral right through the red arms here.

Maybe 5 more days to finish?!

I didn't add retarder to the paints here.  This means working fast in sections and blending with your fingers sometimes.  I'm usually wearing latex gloves here.

Reworked. Again.  I just didn't like the

way they looked the first time.  I sanded off some of the yellow and reapplied shading (greys) and then a thinner yellow.

Wasn't sure how to paint this.

This green anemone was something I considered difficult (until doing it).

I used straight dark green (shown here) as a background then mixed in this red (to tone it down) then added a little white to do the separate stalks.

The orange and red paints on the right, (AGAIN - 20 YR OLD PAINTS!) were used for the clown fish.

always-challenging; Acrylics

 This Liquitex BASICS paint that I'm using here is about 20 years old.  Still good enough quality to use!

Sometimes you screw up and then you're free-hand painting things ( like I'm doing here with these fish).

This lavender hue is being put on quickly and will gel somewhat then I put on a dark charcoal shade on top.  Then I'm taking fingertips to it to make it look like splotchy coral.

I'm shading this fish before I ever put coloration on them.  The yellow I'm going to add is so translucent that you'll see all this shading.