Gather 'Round these Aquatic Christmas Trees on the Holiday Season!

Image source: Aquafanat.com.ua

It’s Christmas! I suspect that many of you have spent your morning hanging out around the Christmas Tree. While evergreen trees are certainly the most common type of Christmas tree, we at Okeanos Group prefer a slightly wetter type of holiday celebration. So today, we’re going to take a break from our typical article topics to focus on good ol’ fashioned holiday cheer.

These cleverly designed festive aquascapes combine a couple of different design techniques into a single aquascape. We’re not going to cover every single technique — after all, most of them subtly utilize complimenting colors and the rule of thirds. We’re only going to highlight the really obvious techniques. For example, the aquascape shown combines the aquatic tree technique with the visual illusion of white sand. Other aquascapes use white sand to simulate waterfalls, but this aquascape make the sand look more like snow.

Image source: Aquafanat.com.ua

It’s amazing how quickly a few visual tricks can completely change the mood of an aquascape. These two aquariums would actually be fairly warm to the touch, but the white flecks of snow give it a frigid appearance.

Image source: Aquafanat.com.ua

This next aquascape also uses aquatic trees and white sand for snow, but it includes a miniature Santa Claus figurine to bring together the scene. As you may remember, we touched on the concept of using figurines in aquascapes. If you decide to use figurines in your own aquarium, then you definitely don’t want to be too heavy-handed. Otherwise your aquascape will begin to look less and less like a whimsical aquascape and more like kitschy art.

Image source: Aquafanat.com.ua

This religious aquascape is a pretty good example of how to incorporate figurines into a complete scene. The designer of this Nativity scene put extra emphasis on Jesus, Mary, and Joseph by putting them inside of the aquarium, and placing the other figures outside of the tank. This layout keeps the three figures as the focal points while elevating them into special, revered position in the center of the aquarium.

Image source: Aquafanat.com.ua

We cover lots of different aquascaping techniques and themes, but it’s important to remember that there is no single right or wrong way to design your own unique aquarium. Also, don’t try to stuff all of your favorite aquascaping design ideas into a single aquarium. If you have two incompatible ideas, then you might want to spread out your idea across several different aquascapes. The golden rule to always keep in mind, though, is that there are no rules in aquascaping. As long as you create a sustaining ecosystem, you can design any type of aquarium you want.