Sustained Investigation #9

extinction is in sight

8'' x 10''

graphite, charcoal, colored pencil

Contrary to popular belief, the African elephant is not critically endangered. In fact, they're not even endangered, only vulnerable. The Asian elephant, on the other hand, is endangered. They are victims to poaching for their ivory tusks; many are just left to rot in the sun with their tusks hacked off. I wanted to try a new view, so I focused in on the elephant at a side view through the scope of a gun. Elephants are very interesting animals and I believe that people need to educate themselves on what species of elephant is actually endangered.

I first made a reference image on Acorn, printed it, and then gridded it. I made a light sketch in graphite (2B) first then then went over it with 4B and 6B. For the scope, I used charcoal to make it darker and add more contrast. I used PC924 Prismacolor (Crimson Red) for the background. Elephants seem to very gentle creatures and I made the background intense and sort of loud to illustrate what an elephant can't say. A scope obviously makes things larger, so I tried my best to enlarge the part of the elephant the was inside the scope (which was very complicated). I took the original image of the elephant and cropped out the part that was going to be in the focus of the scope. I then copy and pasted that onto the image I was working with and enlarged it so that it would be a little bigger than the rest of the head. Next I erased the edges of it so that it fit into the circle of the scope. I was originally going to leave the background white, but then decided it needed some color contrast because it was too dull with the graphite. The red contrasts nicely and pops well. If I could do something differently, I would want to use only charcoal for the scope because it's a little shiny from the graphite.