there's an elephant in the room

Remember this guy?

Remember when I talked about wanting to do my own painting just like this?  Well guess what:

Yes yes yes!  While I did make a few changes and while my elephant isn't perfect (I freehanded it), I am very happy with the first painting I've completed since my freshman year of college.  Although I must admit it was pretty darn simple:

1) I dry brushed white acryllic paint on the canvas, just enough to cover the whole canvas.  Once it dried (which happened quickly since there wasn't much paint), I dry brushed/streaked some black over the white - not a lot and trust me, it didn't look pretty at this step.  When that dried, I used my painting knife to build up the white to add texture and make the canvas look a little worn or antiqued instead of it just having weird streaks of black.  (The lighting in a basement apartment isn't great, so just believe me when I say you can see said texture and worn-ness).

2) Next step was doing the yellow bits.  Again, I just took the painting knife, got just a bit of yellow, and scraped away.  I added the red because I wanted them to stand out a bit more.  But then I got a little knife paint happy, so I ended up painting over 3 bits with white and redoing the yellow lines again.  No biggie.

3) Then I just looked at the original as a guide and free-handed the elephant lightly in pencil.

4) Then came the watercolors!  FYI, painting knives and watercolors are some of my favorite things to work with.  I ended up doing 2 coats of watercolor on the elephant (and I'm still debating doing a third to make the elephant darker and changing it a bit around the mouth).

5) Lastly, I very lightly free-handed the words, mixed up the blue, and carefully painted away.

And there you have it!  Now I just need to figure out what's getting painted next.  Muahaha.

PS: Over Thanksgiving I read Water for Elephants.  Obsession overload.