Hello Friends!

Here is my “Happy Birthday Elephant”! He is patiently posing so his mom can take his picture. But the only thing on his mind is opening his presents! 😉

I had fun drawing and designing this piece. I drew the elephant in pencil in a sketchbook until I got him the way I wanted him to look. Then I transferred him onto a piece of hot press watercolor paper. It is almost like poster board, but a little thinner. Again, I debated about using watercolors, but I decided on acrylics. I didn’t use tissue paper like I did with the giraffe, though.

Once I had him transferred, I stuck the banner on at the top and placed the balloon where I wanted it. (These are from some sheets of big stickers for poster board that I found at the dollar store!)

Next I sketched out on tissue paper how I wanted the presents to look by placing it on top of my original elephant sketch to get it positioned where I wanted it before transferring it to my drawing. Then I added the rug and used a Crayola crayon to color it. Originally, I was going to color all of it in crayon but decided against it.

After everything was transferred I decided on my teal color for him. Then since the ballon is red, I made his bows and one of his presents red, too. This is to balance out the use of red. Red is a color many artists don’t like to use, because the eye of the viewer is usually attracted to it first. But since I made his bows red, my eye goes to his face first.

I almost used a thicker pen to outline everything except the banner and ballon but decided against it. Sometimes I think outlining it too thickly destracts the eye from my main subject.

Also, I purposely left the background white so it would have a more illustrative look. I tend to love illustrations with lots of white space. This was lots of fun!!

Have a wonderful day! 😀