egg box elephant...

So, ever since my rhino egg box from several whiles back I've been meaning to try for an elephant in a similar vain. Like with the rhino, I didn't have a strong plan of attack, just to use only one egg box for the whole thing, make use of the existing moulded forms where I could and see what happened. I'm particularly surprised and happy with the heavily lidded eyes (which weren't added as separate pieces but are part of the trunk sections). Now, I'm sure there's a egg box hippo to be had as well...

another stab at the elephant's tusk

I don't know why I didn't do this before... couldn't let it alone, those earlier tusks just started to bother me!

pachyderms for cup o doodle blog...

It's been far too long since I last took Don Flores up on his invitation to join the glorious Cup O'Doodle blog and submitted a 'flamencoing' gorilla of sorts... Today I finally pulled my finger out and along with it out came 4 elephants too! I had to exercise artistic license on some of the tusk pacement... but that's half the fun isn't it...

IF "poise" - ongoing pachyderms...

Still exploring treatments for the story characters. This illustration uses the elephant cut outs and charcoal line overlay (with modifications) from the earlier post. With these cut outs as a guide I used watercolour on some really nice cotton rag paper I'd forgotten that I had. Expensive paper for an off the cuff experiment but I've had the paper for ages, too scared to waste it before now (the reason I'll never feel at ease using moleskins as sketch books...). It really is an interesting paper to paint on as the coarse open grain bleeds the paint in unexpected ways while the heavy weight allows for fairly controlled washes on unstretched sheets. After compositing the various elements in photoshop I chopped up the body further to give me more points of articulation for posing in the illustration. I'm really enjoying the balance (no pun intended) of dynamism against quirkiness which this unplanned pose approach gives.