"What colour is the sea?" Topic

At the moment I'm painting my WW2 1:3000 Mediterranean theatre models with a deep Prussian Blue base, which looks very nice, but I just wondered what colours others have experimented with?

When you look at paintings, painters often depicted the sea as green, rather than blue. This might, of course, be because they were painting from the shore, rather in the deeper ocean, but I thought I'd ask the question: does anyone use green?

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Now, I wouldn't use green for the Med, but I'm thinking that maybe it might be something to consider for the North Sea or the Arctic?

Jonesey

I'd tend to go with very dark blue for those dark and stormy locations. . .

Wine dark. See Homer.

More seriously, the sea changes colour due to climate, weather & biological factors:
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Thus there really isn't a 'right' or 'wrong' colour. Indeed even a 'red' sea is possible if it is infested with red algae (supposedly a fairly common event with the Red Sea).

The sea is blue, any fule no that.

Seas reflect the colour of the sky and are also distorted by the colour of the bottom if it is shallow enough. I have seen actual sea colours range from virulent green through grey, blue and almost black.

The North Sea and Atlantic are often grey, because it is cloudy.

But for wargames, water is blue, whether it is sea or rivers, it just looks better.

"C: the big blue wobbly thing with mermaids init."

The sea at Lizard Island ( I was there a few years ago):

Wargamers would laugh if you painted your sea to look like this but in real life, if anything, it was even more translucent to quite an amazing depth.

Obviously, it's white and golden.

NO! It's black and blue!

Ah, the sea? Shades of blue-green, isn't it?

If you put the sea water into a clear glass and look at it, it looks clear.

Lot's of colours. Depends on the Sea and the Conditions. dabbing on a mid blue, mid green, black and white will give you a nice effect.

Ochoin, that picture of the wine dark sea is awesome. I saved it.

- Ix

So many variants… Where?
And it also depends on the sky…

Chose one, preferably where your game will be and above all have ships bases the same.
Unless a fanatic no one will have all redone for southpac, northlant, med…

Ochoin; that picture is truly a winner!

And yep – I know the sea can be all sorts of different colours, and being interested in naval warfare, I'm sure many of us also have a fascination with the sea itself.

I think the main reason for me asking was to see if anyone has experimented successfully with different colours? I will stick with blue, but many years ago I based some moderns on plasticard covered with tetrion (a wall filler – not sure if it has different names outside the UK). This was white and I applied a sort of turquoise-blue-green wash to it. As I remember, it looked quite nice, if a little too pale.

No photos though – it was 30 years ago and I have no idea where those minis are now :-(

Much depends on perspective and the weather. Since gamers are looking down from Olympus and assuming the sun is out but not reflecting off the surface, the sea would be blue, but….if there are whitecaps, the water near the whitecap would tend to be green.
Bob

As already mentioned, the sea is many colors, and it's hard to find a "right" one.

The most practical and aesthetically pleasing approach is to first get your sea gaming surface, then paint the bases of your ships to match or complement it. Ships sailing around with bases a strikingly different color than the gaming surface can totally ruin the illusion. That's one of the reasons people go with clear bases or no bases.

I own a set of "sea" hex mats that are about as close as cloth can be to ochoin's above picture of a beautiful light aqua cove, and they frankly look awful. Personally I recommend a sea surface that is relatively dark, with an overall deep blue containing just a hint of green, mottled with patches of deep aqua and dark gray. See this discussion about playing surfaces for some suggestions.

- Ix

Having lived by the sea all my life, and worked on it for half of it, I can tell you with 100% accuracy that's its just about any colour from green, to blue, to dark grey. The middle of the Atlantic looks like dark grey custard when its calm. The Caribbean looks an glacier blue or emerald green on a good day.
As YA says, choose a colour that matches the gaming surface. It will match the sea…somewhere.

I prefer a deep blue/green colour for deep water. The bright colours are more suitable for shallow water round beaches and reefs.
I used Phthalocyanin Green for my sea bases and I think it looks about right, but really for North Sea or North Atlantic I should have used a green/grey.

While it is true that the sea can be many different colours as explained above, there is something psychological in us humans that says "blue = water".

Some years ago I tried painting some river sections a darkish green (the colour as best as I could make out of a local river). Even with copious layers of varnish it still didn't look right or look anything like water. Then I got some other river sections which had been pre-painted a (fairly bright) blue. They immediately suggested water. So much so that I haven't used the green painted river since.

this color….

YouTube link

YouTube link

Deep water is an almost purplish color, but has odd almost-green highlights to it.

The wake of a ship is pretty bright blue, almost a sky blue.

And when the ship goes to a backing bell, you get this impossibly bright blue water.

I have used Paynes Grey acrylic, with white streaked in. I apply it thickly ( impasto?) and then touch up with streaks of grey, dark greens etc. I am trying to get something like the North Atlantic and I like the overall effect. The front page pics on the Yahoo 1/3000 naval wargaming group are mine and there is an album of my stuff in same group, so gives an idea of the effect. Tried to link to it but it just goes to all pics on site.

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Think this might be the right file

Some of my favorite naval miniature basing jobs:

Very blue, but very nice:

More like those at this blog.

A nice example of "sea green" by WTJ:

Two views of a basing job that would blend in perfectly on my old felt sea cloth:

A nice, dark, "deep sea" result from this blog, including a step-by-step photo tutorial:

Just fantastic models & basing.

Matching the cloth or whatever clearly needs to be a consideration.

Ooh, nice!

IMHO, using lighter colors on a gaming table can be helpful in compensating for relatively dim indoor lighting. It would be different if I played outdoors in daylight, but I don't. So after much experiment, I settled on this relatively light blue-green. The previous table color was a dark blue.

Even though I wanted something that "looked good", there is actually some real-world justification for my lighter color. In the real world, what we see from off to the side is partly the reflected sky, so the color can be lighter if desired and still be realistic. In the real world, the darkest color is only observed when looking down. Examples:

Mark H.

some beautiful examples there, thanks lx – I drooled over some of these sites before'

I don't know what it is, but the fantasy guys seem to be big on 'the look' – this is a really nice board…

YouTube link

Funny how realism doesn't feature in the games, and yet they are streets ahead when it comes to an aesthetic playing surface!

That Distopian Wars fantasy sea is indeed pretty.

However for big ships on the open ocean, the mottled pattern is out of scale. At a scale appropriate to 20th century warships, the ocean color should be relatively uniform. The main things you would see from the air would be the ship, and the wake. Lots of the ocean game mats make this mistake (too mottled) as well. See photos.

MH.

What does "/mivacommon/hits/index.mv: Line 497: MvLOCKFILE: Runtime Error: Error creating lockfile 'boards/hits.dbf.lck': Timed out waiting for lock " mean??

MH

And again … This error message seems to result in the post count not being incremented in the Message Board listing.

MH

What does "/mivacommon/hits/index.mv: Line 497: MvLOCKFILE: Runtime Error: Error creating lockfile 'boards/hits.dbf.lck': Timed out waiting for lock " mean??

It's your punishment for slagging off nicely mottled seascape mats.

- Ix

I'm doing AoS (1793-1815) and I tend towards turquoise as the base colour, I have a variety of these from several manufacturers and like to experiment.

I find it puts me in mind of the Med rather than the muddy brown of the Irish Sea out of my window…

During the time that I was assembling my French and British fleets for gaming of AWI naval operations in the West Indies, my wife and I happened to have taken a Caribbean cruise. I was quite struck by the color of the sea there, as it differed rather dramatically from the dull colors of the Atlantic (I live on the US New England coast). My stands are painted a light, slightly turquoise, bluish-green – rather like Hinds' photo above.

From a broader perspective, I have seen the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Caribbean, the North Sea and the Persian Gulf and fully agree with JezEger's perspective on the colors of the sea.

B

I must say, I'm sick of blue wargames rivers. Including the Nile and the Danube.

It's your punishment for slagging off nicely mottled seascape mats.

Well, serves me right then. :-)

That kind of mottled look reminds me of shallow tropical water, seen from the air. In the case of the following example, it is a function of varying water depth, coral formations, and sea grass. Since the dark blue circular part is about 900 feet across, it does resemble the game mats, but remember most of this water is shallow:

Mark H.

That looks like the blue hole in Belize. Very shallow for miles from shore. Took our tenders 45 minutes to get in to there!

If your sea surface is semi-gloss, it will appear lighter as the reflected light increases. This is vinyl fabric:

That's a cracking looking game NC – what is it?

Bozkashi Jones,

The photo is from this report:

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It was chosen to show what the normally medium blue fabric looks like when sunshine reflects off it. Unfortunately the ship bases don't blend in well under those conditions (see the fleet at the top of the photo).

Great answers!!! Was a sailor from 1974 to 2003. It all depends on where you are located.

On our cruise out of NYC to the Western Caribbean, my most striking memory of the color/texture of the non-littoral ocean's surface was what can best be described as "blue coal" --very much like the German ships' bases in the latter of Yellow Admiral's photos.

The North Atlantic was pretty much grey every time I crossed it, the Indian Ocean tended to be a bright blue, the North Pacific was grey, but I only crossed that in winter. Med was blue when the sun was shining, but could be grey in bad weather. So, as others have explained, it depends upon where and weather.

ODGW clear bases look great, your table is the color. Love them. Nice etched bow waves too.

Sea colors remind me very much of iridescent clothing popular in the distant 60s. Although my WWII convoy and U-Boats are on a near blue-black base (for night), a mixture of grey, green, blue and white seems appropriate for the many conditions of daylight.