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.