Hello from Texas

[Jawjagrrl]

On 10/13/2021 at 4:07 AM, Odd Duck said:

They are similar in shape but the Pink Flamingo is bigger and wider (and pink!) and the lucens is very narrow, much shorter, and a bright, light green.

Pink Flamingo seems to be a hot ticket ATM, especially with the (aspirational for me) European aquascapers I follow. Some of them are struggling with it, even in high tech setups, but I'd love to use it one day. 

Feel free to offer suggestions on plants for a 5gal portrait tank with decent light but no CO2. I love my "Endor" tank, but the one I did first... not so much.

One thing that seems to be doing well for me is adapting mosses from my farm (all chem free, so no worries there) to aquatic environments. My shrimp tank has done especially well with the moss sending up 2-3" tendrils from the "carpet". 

[Odd Duck]

On 10/13/2021 at 1:35 PM, Jawjagrrl said:

Pink Flamingo seems to be a hot ticket ATM, especially with the (aspirational for me) European aquascapers I follow. Some of them are struggling with it, even in high tech setups, but I'd love to use it one day. 

Feel free to offer suggestions on plants for a 5gal portrait tank with decent light but no CO2. I love my "Endor" tank, but the one I did first... not so much.

One thing that seems to be doing well for me is adapting mosses from my farm (all chem free, so no worries there) to aquatic environments. My shrimp tank has done especially well with the moss sending up 2-3" tendrils from the "carpet". 

If it doesn’t inspire you, change it!

Sit down, take a good long look at it and let your mind kind of slide away.  Too much thinking gets in the way, sometimes.  Squint at it a little and see if you can figure out what bothers you about it.  Then you’ll know how to fix it and make it work.  It may take you a while to find just the right thing to make it work, but you’ll get your idea someplace on what you want to do.

I know what bothers me about the Bad Pea Daddy’s tank, but I’m waiting to find just the right piece of wood for it.  In the mean time, I’m going to see if switching two of the wood pieces that are in there and moving the lighter colored Anubias onto my rock makes me feel better about it.  

Show us pictures and tell us what you do and don’t like.  Then the collective brain will toss out ideas.  One will probably grab you and then you run with it.

Yep, those pink ones can be tricky!

[Jawjagrrl]

On 10/14/2021 at 5:50 PM, Odd Duck said:

Sit down, take a good long look at it and let your mind kind of Show us pictures and tell us what you do and don’t like.  Then the collective brain will toss out ideas.  One will probably grab you and then you run with it.

My husband and I looked at a lot of scapes this summer - the gamut from a spongebob ornament and gloplants (lol) to classic Japanese styles, forests, mountainsides with "waterfalls". Not to emulate because we know it's a huge learning curve just as any art form is (my profession), but to see what appealed to us.

I bought wood (online, nothing close by) and sourced rock from our farm, which has a lot of interesting mica content (hmmm... the algae bloom just made more sense. Last photo is what I am battling now). We tried to go with a basic mountain hardscape with a path and "trees" with epiphytes/moss balls.

Looking at it as a designer, the scale on the wood and plants is all wrong. This is a tiny tank (5 gal portrait) and I don't want to do CO2 injection on this one. I like the slope I got with the soil and the rocks, path and little slate bridge, but I don't think the wood or plants are working. Photos from when it was recently set up - I had tried a method of blending aqua soil and fine bits of javafern and spreading on the hardscape and misting for a couple of weeks- I had seen one scape channel do this well and liked the idea, but didn't do well for me. The black back works well for my endor tank, but I wish this one could be brighter. Have probably been overthinking it, but it's an old art director habit. My cat supervisor Daniel enjoys it regardless.

[Odd Duck]

On 10/14/2021 at 7:18 PM, Jawjagrrl said:

My husband and I looked at a lot of scapes this summer - the gamut from a spongebob ornament and gloplants (lol) to classic Japanese styles, forests, mountainsides with "waterfalls". Not to emulate because we know it's a huge learning curve just as any art form is (my profession), but to see what appealed to us.

I bought wood (online, nothing close by) and sourced rock from our farm, which has a lot of interesting mica content (hmmm... the algae bloom just made more sense. Last photo is what I am battling now). We tried to go with a basic mountain hardscape with a path and "trees" with epiphytes/moss balls.

Looking at it as a designer, the scale on the wood and plants is all wrong. This is a tiny tank (5 gal portrait) and I don't want to do CO2 injection on this one. I like the slope I got with the soil and the rocks, path and little slate bridge, but I don't think the wood or plants are working. Photos from when it was recently set up - I had tried a method of blending aqua soil and fine bits of javafern and spreading on the hardscape and misting for a couple of weeks- I had seen one scape channel do this well and liked the idea, but didn't do well for me. The black back works well for my endor tank, but I wish this one could be brighter. Have probably been overthinking it, but it's an old art director habit. My cat supervisor Daniel enjoys it regardless.

Yep, you’re exactly right.  The scale is off balance.  Your rock needs to either be bigger or at least look bigger.  Or the wood needs to be bigger or look bigger.  You could bring the wood much more into the foreground and pretend the rock is in the distance and use plants on the rock that have very tiny leaves to push the perspective.

Josh Sims is a very good aquascaper that often does the reverse of many aquascapers by using forced perspective and putting things in the back that are very small (twigs, plants, etc) and larger scale things in the front.  This “fools” the eye into thinking there is much more depth in the tank.  You could put “larger” leafed stem plants glued onto your branches like Alternanthera reineckii ‘Mini’ with the branches near the front.  Lifting up the AR ‘Mini’ closer to the light would get you more color.

Then use some moss or maybe tiny Crypt. parva on the rock (you can glue Crypts to stuff like you would Anubias) as a very tiny leaved plant (I would put them very close together) that would make the rock look more like a mountain in the background.  Moss would likely be the best for making it look like seams of pine trees in the crevices of a mountain.  Or moss up higher with a mix of moss and Crypt. parva down lower pretending to be deciduous trees mixing in at a lower elevation.  Push that rock back but upward in the tank as far as you can.

The wood needs to be as close to the front as possible since it’s pretending to be a tree with fall colors starting, right next to you while you stand on the opposite mountain.  Then the rock is your far distant mountain across the valley.  Your little wood bridge needs to be MUCH narrower since it would be in the distance between two far off mountains.

Just a thought on how to push the perspective.