Take yourself on a little safari with brush, paint, and paper, to see two elephants blithely strolling by at a slow pace through the grasslands of the Savannah.
My color palette for this project. See My Materials
1Draw a light horizontal guideline right acroos the middle of the paper. Add a vertical line at each side of the paper to help you maintain an equal distance from the edges. Position the two elephants in the lower section of the picture, by sketching their prominent shapes with light pencil marks directly under the horizontal line, as shown below.
2Still working below the horizontal line, draw the outline of a range of hills behind the elephants. When you are satisfied with your composition, rub out the guidelines and draw a rough, vertical rectangle with rounded corners around the drawing. This will help hold the individual sections of the picture together from a visual perspective.
3Now start on the bright blue sky. A size 14 flat brush is suitable for this extensive area, which takes up around half of the illustration. First paint a narrow dark blue strip at the top and add a lighter blue while it is still wet, so that the two shades merge into one another. The further you go towards the hills, the lighter and more transparent the blue color should become. You can achieve this by diluting the paint with more and more water and gradually drawing it downwards. You can also get a little water on a clean brush and dab it upwards over the applied paint, so that much of the color is pushed upwards.
4Create a base layer for the Savannah over the entire ground area with a soft ocher shade. Don’t be afraid to use a lot of water, as it will make it easier for you to dab darker shades onto the base layer and let the color run over the paper. The color gradations produced should give the impression of natural grasslands.
5Allow the color to dry properly and then paint the hills in a shade of brown. Leave some areas white to reflect the light.
6Now start to fill in the elephants’ bodies with a light gray base and sufficient water. Dab the areas of shadow with a darker color. You can also dab the areas that you want to keep light with a clean, moist brush, if necessary.
7When it’s all dry, draw in the two eyes and the tusk with a black fineliner pen. In order to separate some of the body parts and define them more clearly, you can draw in the relevant lines with a white Uni-Ball Signo pen.
if an area intended to be kept light gets too dark, just dab the paint off with a cloth. This enhances the light effect.