Bulwagi......Ears

The title of this piece, Bulwagi....Ears is the command that the elephant trainer gave Bulwagi and this is the resulting picture that my husband took.  From this we got the picture and he got a quarter piece of an apple.  Bulwagi is the star of the Birmingham Alabama Zoo's bachelor elephant herd, this is the only zoo herd of males in the world, emulating what happens in the wild naturally.  He is the old man that all the younger males are measuring themselves against and learning from.  The boys spend their days putting their heads together and pushing each other around while they gauge who is the strongest and smartest of all - the dominant male.  And yes, if you notice he only has one tusk, he had an injury when he was young and lost one of his tusks. 
This is another experiment, and I am not sure if this is going to be a pastel or graphite painting.  But what I wanted was to create a colorful elephant so I added pastel colors matching the photo values all over the white matboard I am working on.  Then I am going back in with graphite pencil and am going to add in all the detail wrinkles and folds on his hide.  You can see that I have been working on his left ear and using different grades of pencil to get the different coloration of grays to blacks on top of the pastel that I have on the board.  I have been noodling this around for many a night (thank God for insomnia I guess) and decided it's time to go for it.  I think at the end I am going to try to also add some graphite powder to see if I can give more texture to his rough skin.
Thanks for stopping by and hope you are having a great weekend!!!   

Comments

hmuxo said…
This is very interesting, Nelvia. I look forward to seeing the process in this painting.
August 10, 2014 at 6:43 AM
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