Creating my Shells

I needed to make pieces that looked like pieces of the snail shell that had cracked on her head. The concept is that when she was born her scalp was covered in one shell, but as she grew older her human hair began to grow and caused the shell to crack and pieces to fall off. I decided to use sea shells for this as they are very hard and have a very similar texture to that of a snail's shell. The shells I used are shown below.

I had a photo of the snail's shell I was taking inspiration from whilst I was painting the shells to make sure they were accurately done. I first painted them white with white acrylic paint, making sure to keep the layers thin enough so that the texture of them still came through. 

I then took a smaller brush and painted on all the yellow lines and the red lines. I mixed the red with a tiny bit of black to make it darker and I mixed the yellow with some white to make it less bright. I tried to make them all slightly different so that they didn't look too artificial.

I needed to add black to the colours to outline them. I first used a very thin paint brush and black acrylic paint; however I found it difficult to control and found the lines were very wonky and uneven. I therefore decided to use a black felt tip pen because it gave me more control and accuracey. This was time consuming but I am happy with how they came out. 

Once all the paint had dried I crushed them all up with big metal pliers. I didn't want the pieces to be too small because I wanted it to be fairly obvious what they were in the hair and I didn't want them to just look like bits of dirt. The image below shows the broken up bits of shell I will be using in my models hair.