How to Draw an African Elephant
Step 1
Start by drawing the tusk of your African Elephant in pencil. Draw lightly at first so that you can erase easily if you want to change anything.
Step 2
Next add the head and trunk.
Step 3
Now we can add the outline of the ear and the eye.
Step 4
Next comes the upper part of the back and tail.
Step 5
Now draw in the back leg and the line of its belly.
Step 6
Time now to add the first front leg and foot.
Step 7
Draw in the second hind leg.
Step 8
Add in the second front leg and foot.
Step 9
CONGRATULATIONS! YOU’VE DRAWN AN AFRICAN ELEPHANT!
Ideas and Techniques in graphite pencil for drawing an Elephant
Once you have finished your easy to draw Elephant there is a lot more to learn that would serve you well in your more advanced animal drawing. I recommend watching the video below of me drawing a Rottweiler in graphite pencil. In the video, I am practicing a method whereby I initially draw the volumes of the animal with straightforward circles. This gives a solid foundation for your animal drawing, and also you can use precisely the very same strategy in your Elephant drawing
Graphite pencils are rated according to their relative hardness. The harder the pencil, the lighter the line it makes on the page. The softest pencil will certainly make a fairly dark line, and having a variety of hardness will give depth and a more dramatic atmosphere to your ………. drawing.
To go into more detail, pencils are graded for hardness and softness utilizing the HB range. A normal set of 5 pencils appropriate for animal drawing in general, will range from 8B, the softest, to HB, the hardest. You can purchase harder pencils than HB, but these are much more suited to various types of technical drawing styles. When you try to get away with working with simply a single HB pencil, you will certainly find yourself pushing down too hard in a futile attempt to obtain a deep enough tone. Switching to a softer pencil is a much better solution, especially as a set of 5 pencils is not too expensive. You can see the range of effects it can create in the image further down.
Watch this video to get tips and learn techniques that you can apply, should you like to do a more advanced drawing of an African Elephant
Choose Your Next Animal 2 Draw!
Ideas and Techniques in colored pencil for drawing an African Elephant
I’m a big advocate of colored pencils when it comes to sketching animals in general, and for including some color to your sketch of a Bald Eagle, they are simply the best. They are actually very easy to use, providing an amazing level of control, and also you can tidy them away quickly after you have finished drawing for that day.
You do not need to purchase the most costly brand name of colored pencils for your Elephant drawing, yet you mostly get what you pay for, so don’t opt for the cheapest ones either. You can find hard, soft, watercolor (these are soluble in water permitting you to paint over them with a brush full of water to soften areas of your drawing) and oil based.
See to it you recognize the difference before you purchase, specifically if you purchase your pencils online. Get two or 3 of each sort of coloured pencil to see which kind you enjoy using the most before buying a full range of pencils. If you buy a blue, red, and a yellow pencil of each kind you can have a great deal of fun blending them on a sheet of watercolor paper to obtain a wide range of colors.
Ideas and Techniques in Watercolor for drawing an African Elephant
Drawing an Elephant in Watercolor is not as hard as it may appear at first glance. This is because you can use watercolor in several ways. You can use it with a huge soft round brush called a Mop, or a huge flat brush called a Wash Brush or just a “Flat”. These brushes work well for backgrounds to your Elephant drawing, enabling you to make use of a method called “wet in wet” which can be great amusement as it is extremely easily done
” Wet in wet” is one of the great experiences you can have with watercolor, painting directly right into either moistened paper or a tinted wash that has actually not yet dried. You can change the results tremendously by varying the amount of wetness when you paint right into the wash or damp paper. Play around with this just for the enjoyment on a scrap little bit of watercolor paper to get experience as well as self-confidence.
” Dry Brush” is the opposite technique, best for adding the smallest of details, and also a remarkable complement to Wet in Wet. It is exactly what it seems like, making use of a small amount of water as well as paint, loaded onto a 4 or 6 Round brush, it provides an optimum amount of control for small areas of your painting. You might utilize this technique to draw in the details of your African Elephant’s face, for instance, or the appearance of its wrinkly grey skin. This is likewise where you could use an extremely little brush, such as a 000 Round as an example.
The following technique is among my individual favourites for the control it offers you for producing subtle tones. Basically, you cover an area with flat color or tone and then you allow it to dry thoroughly. Then, you take a clean wet brush and you carefully lift off the color or tone you wish to lighten. You can use different sizes of brush depending on the final result you want to achieve. These are simply several of the strategies you can make use of when drawing your elephant in watercolor, so get started and enjoy yourself!.
Some Interesting Facts about Elephants
Elephant tusks can weigh up to 100 pounds each which is rather remarkable because in fact they’re actually the elephant’s incisor teeth which became elongated overtime as they evolved.
Elephants have been known to live up to 70 years old in the wild. An elephant can grow to more than 12 feet in height, which is rather tall I think!
The weight of an elephant can exceed 12,000 pounds which is quite heavy. The teeth of an elephant are more than 12 inches long and they can weigh up to 11 pounds. The African elephant has a trunk that ends in two lips which it can use to pick things up, as opposed to the Asian elephant which has only one, and so the Asian elephant must wrap its trunk around things to pick them up.
African elephants have the largest brain of any land animal, and the average weight of an elephant’s brain is eleven pounds. They spend a lot of their time in forests, deserts near shrubs, and roaming in the grasslands of the Savannah. They form family units, sometimes combining several families together, and generally led by the oldest female elephant, the matriarch of the herd.
Elephants often show their feelings, and the male and female can often be seen holding each other’s trunks during the mating ritual, which is quite sweet. The African elephant uses its trunk as a fifth limb, a method of touching things, and also a method of amplifying sound when it gives it’s typical trumpeting call.
The scientific term for an African elephant is Loxodonta Africana. The Loxo part of the name means oblique, and Donta means tooth.
They are the largest living animal on the land and they live in central, western and eastern Africa. There are two kinds of African elephant, the African bush elephant, and the African forest elephant. They’re scattered through sub saharan Africa.
The most noticeable, distinctive feature of the elephant is of course it’s long trunk, which is also known as a proboscis. They use these for many purposes, particularly breathing, grasping objects, and lifting water. Elephants are herbivores which means they live on plants.
