Watercolor Seashells

I spent the morning playing with some seashells and taking photos of them for a still life painting I am going to start soon. I have an awesome SLR camera that seems to be much smarter than me as I could not get it to focus on all 3 shells at once. I know there is a setting for this but where is it again... so rather than read the manual again I put two photos together.

I liked the angle a bit better of the back shell in the one photo where the focus was crisp on the back shell and softer on the first two shells. Then I grabbed the first two shells from another photo where the spiral was the focus point. I put them together and just loosely touched up the photo to make things a bit smoother.

I bought these shells last year when I was christmas shopping and have been trying to find the time to paint them, whew, just under a year! I was going to do a mix of different shell types but these ones just seemed to fall together so nicely, so maybe a mixture for next time.