Family of Elephant Sculptures

Please visit this link to see the entire post about my recent Elephant Family sculptures.

http://farmgirlarts.com/2012/06/elephant-family-love/

Elephant Sculpture: "The Matriarch" is in the House!!!

Some 80 hours, 14 ounces of wool and many wrinkles  later, photos of the Elephant Matriarch follow:
(Ginny Weiler, Photographer)

 

She measures 8.5 inches tall x 13 inches long (trunk to tail). No armature was used. All wool!!

Imagine a 14 ounce pile of fluffy Suffolk down wool needled tightly into this shape.

The tusks were the hardest part of all!

I loved adding the wrinkles here, trunk, sides, back legs, flanks, ears, etc.

The Quarter is there just for scale.

In the Studio: Elephant

Houston, We have Ears!

Ears and gray really helps!

Don't know when I'll ever embark on such a large sculpture again!

 

Sculpting an Elephant

Elephants' bodies are truly complicated. Much more difficult to understand and recreate than cats, dogs, bears, turtles, etc. I have an "idea" of the elephant body, but once I began really LOOKING at elephant pictures, I noticed how wrong that idea was. The joints are quite different from dogs and other four legged animals we're familiar with. The front legs are much longer and the spine is lower in the back. Last night I recorded a PBS show on animal communication which included a segment on elephants so I could refer to them moving as often as I like. 

Because I am making the Elephant nearly 3 times the size of my usuals and because I'm so unfamiliar with this body, this sculpture is taking much longer than I thought!

It is a fun challenge, though!