An Elephant a Day 2.0

International Elephant Foundation Elephant's World (Thailand)

Boon Lott's Elephant Sanctuary (Thailand)
Wildlife SOS (India)
The Elephant Sanctuary (Tennessee)
David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation

Wednesday, 30 October 2013

Elephant No. 58: Skelephant

I bought a paint-your-own wooden skeleton weeks ago, thinking I could turn it into some kind of skelephant—maybe even one that would glow in the dark. Since Hallowe'en is tomorrow, I decided to finally make this for today's elephant.

The wooden form was obviously meant to be a human skeleton, so I figured it needed at least a bit of tweaking to make it into an elephant. To make sure I didn't completely embarrass myself, I thought I'd look up x-rays of elephants online. Then I remembered that it's impossible to x-ray an entire elephant, so I decided instead to look at images of actual elephant skeletons—particularly the skull.

I did remember that elephants have large holes in the centre of their skulls, so I planned to cut something out of the centre of my wooden skeleton's head. And, since teeth are usually part of a skeleton, I planned to add a couple of wooden tusks, cut out of thin plywood. With visions of x-rays still in my head, I thought briefly about adding a ghostly trunk, then remembered that this was a skeleton, not an x-ray or ectoplasmic elephant.

3-D elephant skull model.
Source: http://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/3ds-max-elephant-skull-
skeleton/715292

I began by placing plain white paper over the wooden skeleton, in order to figure out what the tusks should look like. I also traced out the void in the forehead. I used this image to guide my drawing of the central hole in the skull. There wasn't a lot of room in the forehead of the wooden shape for an additional hole, so it's definitely not to scale.

I'm pretty good with a jigsaw—my only possible claim to power-tool fame—so I cut out the void and the tusks with my trusty jigsaw. I then sanded the edges of everything to clean them up. I hate sanding, as you can see by the many raggedy edges that remained.

I painted everything with inexpensive white acrylic paint next, and let it dry. I hadn't thought about the fact that I'd have to paint all four "sides" of this three-dimensional form. Sigh. I painted everything with one coat of white paint, and put two coats on the front.

I glued the tusks to the skeleton form with a glue gun. By now, many of you will know that I also hate glue guns. At least I didn't burn myself today.

Now, to give the whole thing an eerie look, I decided to paint it with glow-in-the-dark paint. This stuff was much more expensive than I had expected. For this
207 ml/7 oz. jar, it was about twelve dollars. Add that to the six dollars it cost me for a 2 x 2-foot (60 x 60 cm) piece of 1/4-inch (0.6 cm) plywood to make a couple of measly tusks, and the two dollars for the elephant, and this was one of the more expensive elephants I've made.

I had originally thought I'd be painting this to look like an x-ray, so I had visions of carefully painting to make the bones look slightly dimensional. You can imagine how happy I was to remember that a skeleton is just bleached white bones. So I just painted everything the same. I wasn't sure if thicker layers would glow more, but it didn't really matter.

The instructions on the can say to paint two coats for best effect, leaving 45 minutes between coats. I think they tell you that because it's so hard to see the paint on the surface that they want to make sure you've actually covered everything. I was also not very careful, more or less glopping it on and not worrying about nice brushstrokes.

I reassembled the whole thing with twists of black wire, and left it to dry for about an hour. And then, for the moment of truth. I put this outside in daylight for about an hour, then brought it inside to see if it really would glow in the dark. Never having painted glow-in-the-dark paint on anything, I wasn't sure what to expect. Well . . . nothing.

Thinking I needed to add more paint, I put on two more really thick coats, let it dry, then stuck it under a bright bulb for a couple of hours. Still nothing. It does have a very faint glow, but it's so faint that my camera literally couldn't pick it up at all. Most disappointing.

The instructions say it needs "several hours" in light to charge up, but this has been in either daylight or artificial light all day, so I'm not sure why it doesn't work. If I'd had glow sticks on hand, I probably would have broken a couple open and doused the skelephant in whatever scary substance is inside your average glow stick.

I still had the skeleton itself, however. It's nothing like a real elephant skeleton, but if you could get an elephant to stand up, and ignored the fact that an elephant's eyes are normally on the sides of its head, this might squeak by. Or end up reminding you of a human skeleton with a severe head injury and a handlebar moustache. Or a walrus.

I'm not sure if this skelephant will be part of tomorrow's Hallowe'en decorations, and I'm peeved that it doesn't glow in the dark, but I may sand it down at some point, paint it white again, then decorate it as a Day of the Dead skelephant. Kind of wish I'd thought of that in the first place.

Elephant Lore of the Day

Because I'm not likely to do too many elephant skeletons, I thought I'd bring back a bit of elephant lore from the original Elephant a Day blog about elephant skulls and the myth of the Cyclops.

An elephant's head weighs literally hundreds of pounds. To support this weight, there are extra muscles along the neck. Interestingly, an elephant's skull is also filled with tiny air pockets, just like the bones of birds, to keep it relatively light.

Some palaeontologists believe that the Greek myth of the one-eyed Cyclops arose from discoveries of the skulls of dwarf elephants on Cyprus, Crete and Malta. These elephants had skulls roughly the size of humans, but with a large cavity in the middle of the head. Because these early Mediterraneans may have lacked direct knowledge of elephants, is is conceivable that they believed they were looking at a humanoid skull with a large central eye socket.

Skull of dwarf elephant on display at
the Hellabrun Zoo, Munich, Germany.
Photo: MaxM
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dwarfelephant.jpg

To Support Elephant Welfare

International Elephant Foundation Elephant's World (Thailand)

Boon Lott's Elephant Sanctuary (Thailand)
Wildlife SOS (India)
The Elephant Sanctuary (Tennessee)
David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation

Tuesday, 29 October 2013

Elephant No. 57: Little Hallowe'en Illustrations

Hallowe'en is only a couple of days away, so for today's elephant I thought I'd draw some little Hallowe'en-themed illustrations with elephants. Most of these are about two or three inches by an inch or two (5–7.5 cm x 2.5–5 cm), which was about the size I wanted to work with today.

I didn't really have an idea of what these would look like when I started, but I figured something would probably come to me.

I thought about using a drafting pen for these, then decided to avoid the annoyance of clogged tips and just use a really fine marker.

I began by sketching out some ideas in pencil, mostly just to inspire myself. I hadn't planned to end up with a bunch of elephants in Hallowe'en costumes, but that's what happened.

Duly inspired, I began doing the ink versions. This is what I ended up with, in the order in which I drew them.

They looked a bit plain, and I had some extra time, so I decided to colour them in. I thought watercolour might look nice, so I used a hairdryer on my original drawings, just to make sure they were water-resistant.

Instead of watercolour paint, I used watercolour pencils, which are a little less opaque. And here are the final versions.

Sometimes I like small projects like this. And sometimes I just like drawing. I wasn't sure how well elephants would lend themselves to a Hallowe'en theme when I started, but I'm rather pleased with the way these little guys turned out.

Elephant Lore of the Day

Although elephants aren't afraid of mice, according to ancient Roman writings, they're terrified of squealing pigs.

In On the Characteristics of Animals, Aelian writes that the Romans put the elephants of Pyrrhus to flight in 275 B.C. by setting pigs among them. Even worse, when Antigonus II was besieging Megara, pigs were released to scatter the war elephants. To make sure they squealed, the unfortunate creatures were cruelly smeared with pitch and set on fire. The elephants bolted in terror from the flaming, squealing pigs, often killing their own soldiers.

Pliny the Elder also writes of the ability of a squealing pig to startle an elephant, saying "elephants are scared by the smallest squeal of the hog." And in The Gothic War, Procopius describes how a war elephant approached the wall of the besieged town of Edessa. Although the elephant easily loomed over that particular section of wall, the defenders suspended a squealing pig from the walls, causing the elephant to panic and run amok.

Source: https://blogs.k-state.edu/kstatenews/2012/11/15/researchers-
sequence-swine-genome-discover-associations-that-may-
advance-animal-and-human-health/

To Support Elephant Welfare

International Elephant Foundation Elephant's World (Thailand)

Boon Lott's Elephant Sanctuary (Thailand)
Wildlife SOS (India)
The Elephant Sanctuary (Tennessee)
David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation

Monday, 28 October 2013

Elephant No. 56: Black-and-White Charcoal Drawing

As those who read this blog regularly will know, I like Derwent products, and I have a lot of them. (Alas, no, I don't have stock in the company or a deal to promote them.)

One of the Derwent things I had yet to try, however, was what one artist called the "blackest black you'll ever see in a charcoal." Well, how can one not be intrigued by such a statement—even someone as completely colour-mad as I.

This blackest-black-of-all-blacks came in the tin of Derwent XL Charcoal that I bought some weeks back. I'd tried almost everything else in the tin, but not the black. The whole idea of something that dark kind of scared me. It surely wouldn't erase, even with the best of kneadable erasers, so I was certain to be stuck with whatever marks I made. This always gives me hives.

To give myself my best shot at a successful drawing with such fat charcoal, I used a piece of watercolour paper measuring 18 x 24 inches (45.7 x 60.9 cm). Why watercolour paper? Because charcoal is naturally water-soluble, I'm told, so I thought perhaps I could paint over my mistakes, if it came to that.

I also decided to work from a photograph with suitably dark areas. This is the photograph I chose.

Source: http://www.sawallpapers.com/get/4114.aspx

I took the chicken's way out and sketched the general outline first with willow charcoal. It's still charcoal, but much lighter than the Derwent XL stuff. I also kept a kneadable eraser handy.

This was my first—very tentative—sketch.

Now came the scary part: adding the blackest-black-of-all-blacks. I more or less just blocked in the darkest areas, not exactly sure where I would go from here.

I figured smudging things with my fingers might be the next thing to do, so that's what I did. I smudged things heavily in the darkest areas, then ran my messy fingers into adjacent areas.

This looked kind of interesting to me, but I thought it needed some definition to give it a more finished look. To create sharp lines, I used a tourtillon, a kneadable eraser, and a touch of willow charcoal around the eyes and ears. I also smudged in a light background, removing some of the sky smudges with the eraser to create the look of clouds.

And that was pretty much it. This was indeed one of the blackest blacks I've ever used, and it made its presence known by getting on everything: fingers, clothes, parts of the paper where it had no business being, my face, my sandwich . . .

I decided against using water on this, so after about an hour and a half, I felt I was done. It's not a masterpiece, by any means, but I like it a lot for the amount of time I spent on it. It's much larger than I normally work, and in a medium that generally terrifies me, but now that I've tried it, I think I could get to like it.

Elephant Lore of the Day

Although most elephant rampages are carried out by large adults who are either in musth or simply fed up, a couple of years ago a surprisingly small elephant did a lot of damage before he was finally tranquilized.

In June 2011, a young wild elephant ventured out of the forest and into the heart of Mysore—a city of almost 900,000 people in southwestern India. Estimated to be about eight to ten years of age, the elephant strayed into the city with a tuskless male a few years older.

According to a witness who tracked the elephants from the time they entered a marketplace, the elephants became agitated by the unexpected crowds. And as the crowd panicked, so did the elephants. In the confusion, the tuskless elephant soon became separated from the "tusker", fleeing to an area near a sewage-treatment plant, where it more or less stayed put. The tusker, however, terrorized the city for a full six hours.

He first attacked a pair of cows tied to a post, fatalling injuring one of the hapless creatures. Running along a wide road towards a hospital, he came across an elderly man, essentially mowing him down when the man attempted to get out of the way. Chased by crowds of people trying to capture the rampage on camera and cellphone, the elephant ended up in a narrow lane, where he gored and killed a security guard.

Although efforts were made to tranquilize the elephant, the first two attempts failed. Maddened even further by the darts, the elephant attacked a bus and several other vehicles, doing considerable damage. A third tranquilizer dart eventually calmed the animal, who was led away with ropes.

The two wild elephants were kept corralled for a number of hours, until a quartet of festival elephants could be brought in. Domesticated elephants are often used in India to calm wild elephants. Although festival elephants spend part of their life in cities, when not needed for festivals they live in the forest and are able to ease a wild elephant's agitation and help guide it back to its forest home.

To read more, click here.

Young male elephant attacking car in Mysore, June 2011.
Photo: M.A. Sriram
Source: http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/karnataka/young-tusker-
goes-on-the-rampage-in-elephant-city/article2087769.ece

To Support Elephant Welfare

International Elephant Foundation Elephant's World (Thailand)