#ELEPHANT OUTLINE PAINTING HOW TO#
#ELEPHANT OUTLINE PAINTING SKIN#
#ELEPHANT OUTLINE PAINTING PROFESSIONAL#

Instead, you should consider details as a whole.

To avoid this, you shouldn’t be focusing on small details, like drawing every wrinkle, every eyelash, and so on. However, remember that less is more and adding too many things will make it looks overcrowded. When adding details to your drawing of an elephant, it’s easy to get carried away. Now that we have the shapes and volumes shaded, it’s time to start adding details. On the other hand, parts that are heavily shaded have often but not always, thicker and darker lines.Īt this stage, you should have a drawing that looks 3D, but still lacks details and definition. It is particularly important that you vary the line thickness and pressure in the whole drawing, otherwise it will end up looking flat.Īs a general rule of thumb, in places where the light falls directly, the line should be thinner and lighter (for example, look at the forehead).

There isn’t a right way to line-weight your drawings, but with practice you’ll start noticing what looks right. Notice where two different volumes join, and make the line darker or thicker.

#ELEPHANT OUTLINE PAINTING SKIN#

You can use different techniques to shade, but in this case I’d recommend using crosshatching, as the skin of elephants is wrinkled and this type of shading will imitate that texture.Īlong with the shading, you should start playing with the line weight. We identify the source of light (in this case, it comes from the upper right), and start applying shade where the light can’t reach. This is how we’ll make the elephant drawing look three dimensional. Now that we have the object broken into different shapes, we should define the volumes. This step is to make sure all the proportions are set correctly from the start.Īfter this, if you connect all the shapes into one, you should have something similar to this:ģ. Follow the gesture and identify the joints and where the leg changes direction. This will help us have in mind the way the legs join the body.Īt this stage, you should also outline the general direction of the legs without getting into too much detail. It’s very useful to identify the angles made by the shoulder blade and humerus, and by the pelvis and femur (cyan). The most obvious are a circular shape for the body and the head (red), and a trapezoid shape for the ear (yellow). With fast and light strokes, try to define the shapes that make up the elephant’s body. Identify the Basic Shapes of the Elephant On the other hand, this following elephant image has much more contrast between lights and shades, and we can appreciate the roundness of shapes, which gives us a better understanding of the form.

This won’t help us identify volume and depth, and the final drawing will look flat or poorly shaded. The elephant is lit uniformly, and the values of the shades and lights are too similar. For example, this following photo of an African elephant may seem like a good reference for a drawing at first but if we look at it closely, it is not.

Not all pictures will help us in the process of taking apart each of the different shapes that make up the elephant. So, the first step is finding a useful reference. You can’t draw accurately something if you don’t have a detailed image of it in your mind, so this is where it’s useful to look at pictures and try to learn from them.

#ELEPHANT OUTLINE PAINTING PROFESSIONAL#

However, even professional artists lean on references when studying new figures and objects. Beginners are often reluctant to use a reference, because it can feel like cheating. The best way to start when drawing a life-like representation of an elephant is to look at reference pictures.

#ELEPHANT OUTLINE PAINTING HOW TO#

However, this time we will teach you how to draw a more realistic and life-like elephant which is still easy and simple enough for beginners. We were overwhelmed with the response to our previous tutorial on how to draw an elephant, so we decided to create another one for you all 😊.

Elephant outline painting