A third Addo Elephant drawing, and a Pink Elephant

The drawing below is the third in the series of Elephant images I am producing. On this occasion I returned to the format of the first drawing and decided to try out a different background. Utilizing the idea Paul Birchall put forward to develop the ‘Letter from Earth’ painting I rubbed graphite around the outline drawing of the Elephant. Once I had established the background ‘grey scale’ I drew the animal with that as a reference tone.

I chose to adopt the dark background so that the light falling on the Elephant would be more clearly depicted. In fact the background had another effect, directly on my artistic rendition. I was so conscious of it that once the drawing was completed with HB, B, B2 and B5 pencil, I skipped straight to the softer B8 and B9 for my darkest darks. Most of the shadow areas of the Elephant are paler than the background. I think this has given the image a more ‘3D look’, the Elephant head certainly looks to me like it is emerging from the paper.

 

The drawing is on A3 size 200gsm paper. Pencils used were Lyra Art Design and there is probably about 16 to 20 hours of actual work involved in its creation.

Pink Elephant

At some point in the process of creating the third Addo Elephant drawing I was overcome with a need to do something else! So I used the same image outline on a small, A4, watercolour paper to splosh some colour about.

I was actually testing out a piece of old board to see if it would sustain a watercolour being stretched, without staining the paper from behind.

Not regarding this as a serious exercise in creating an artistic work, I thought perhaps painting an Elephant in Rose Madder (W&N Cotman) might be entertaining. To create a dark background I mixed Pthalo Green with Rose Madder to create a grey wash. I am still adding colour to the painting but the image below is where it reached as a two colour rendition.

A second Elephant from Addo National Park

I received some feedback regarding my earlier work on the Elephant subject, mainly about including the rest of the Elephant. The image below is the result of a new A3 work that addresses those comments.

My personal view on this is that the inclusion of the legs changes the overall symmetry of the composition to its detriment, I prefer the earlier approach, and it just feels more intimate and pleasing.

I used a set of Lyra Rembrandt graphite pencils for this one. I used a photograph I took in the Addo NP several years ago as my reference. I see that there are numerous comments on the internet about artwork that fails to give proper attribution and confirm permission from the original photographer. I am fortunate to have a lifelong obsession with taking photographs, consequently I have a large collection of my own images to work from.

Addo Elephant No2