🐘 Elephants on the Plains

036 Elephants on the Plains

This project has been done in exactly the same way as my 'African Savannah' that I finished at the end of May and I have even used the same tree template I made then.  I am hoping that the 'African Savannah' piece will be sold in the Charity Sale at the Hobbycraft store in Newbury so I made a similar piece for my own collection or to sell elsewhere.  It was still experimental as I wanted to see how similar to my original I could get it.  Bearing in mind that I wanted to make it physically different everything else is pretty close.  If I do manage to sell the four that have been donated, and I hope I do, I could quite easily do them again for maybe other charities too.

So of course, the first thing to do here was the taping of the border and then the Sun.  We need to make sure that a piece of canvas that is sun-shaped is kept pure white so that it can stay the nice bright focal point of the piece.  It would be no good painting the sky and then trying to put white or yellow over it, as the orange and reds would just show through.  I used the same technique as last time drew around a 5p piece and carefully trimmed around it.  I then placed it on the bare canvas where the sun will be.

After painting in the sky using Violet, Red, Orange and Yellow paints (making sure of course that the brightest part of the sky was nearest to the dot) it was time to allow it to dry and then remove the dot.  It can be a little tricky to find the edge and also you don't want to scuff your beautiful sky.  I did end up doing that on this one and had to touch it up, but you just need to take a little care and have patience.  I still think using the corner of a craft knife works well.

On this piece I painted the outer edge of the circle Yellow and the rest was white.  I couldn't remember exactly what I did last time.  But comparing photos now, I painted it all white last time and I think it looks better that way too.

Next I got my templates ready.  The Tree was reused from the 'African Savannah' and I found a picture online of a Mother and Baby Elephant.  Perfect.

The picture above shows them taped into position ready to draw around.

And now it is time to remove the templates and fill in all the lines.  I used Winsor and Newton's Mars Black for this with a few drops of Daler Rowney Flow Enhancer mixed in.  This photo was taken while colouring it in.