Thanks Robin. I definitely overdid it with the foam! I certainly could have checked more references (the bread and butter of our hobby, isn’t it, and yet so easy to overlook).
It’s also very possible that other water products or techniques could have been better adapted to this scene.
Honestly, the main thing I wanted to do was to have fun for the first time with water products. Sure has been great motivation to keep playing around with this kind of products.
But I do appreciate the subtlety of your criticism 
; I have to be more serious with my references and to not solely rely on my unreliable memory!
Everybody “knows” that water is blue.
I started thinking about it when I took the assignment of painting the harbour on the model railroad club layout. Some of the others talked about blue so I started checking photos and showing them that brown, green and black were the correct colours. The walls around the layout are painted with blue skies and clouds and
the glossy surface of the “water” reflects the blue at low angles but when seen from above the browns and greens are visible.
Agreed that water can take a vast array of colors, and blue is only one of the many hues it can take depending on many environmental variables. If you look at the Atlantic waters (or possibly, the North sea) on the very first picture of this thread (the inspiration for this vignette), you can see it has darker shades of blue, which is what I kept in mind, but I should have revisited it because it has way less foam than I remembered!
Seen at a shallow angle with a clear sky to reflect.
The tricky part with dioramas is that it is usually not possible to restrict/control
the viewing angle.
Determining the colour of water is like figuring out the colour of a mirror.
