A Baby Elephant in Coloured Pencil, Taken Apart Layer by Layer

By Carol Leather

If you're anything like me, your first thought looking at a finished drawing like this is "I could never." It looks like one seamless, impossible thing.

So let's not start at the beginning. Let's start here, at the end, and take it apart, one layer at a time. By the time we reach the very first marks on the paper, I think you'll see there was no magic moment. Just one sensible step after another.

I normally start with the features, the eye in particular. But as the eye was tiny in this case, I picked the ear as my first landmark. It had shape, whereas little of the body did on this subject. It had tones from light to dark, and they in turn showed form and gradual transitions.

Let's take it apart, slowly

Not all the information for a drawing comes from the photo reference. In this instance, the elephant was photographed at a zoo and was walking in lush green grass.

Although I wasn't planning a complete background, I felt some indication of dusty or sandy ground underfoot would settle the animal in its environment, without bringing too much attention to it. When removed, the drawing resembles a cut-out.

It mattered to me to really "ground" those feet, so they weren't tottering on the surface but firmly planted in it. The front foot in the air showed the toenails and gave a hint of the fleshy foot pad that supports the elephant's body weight. The others were partly hidden by dry grass or dust.

Now the body starts to come away, and notice it goes from the back forwards. The hindquarters were always the quietest part of the drawing, less detail, less of my attention, so there's less to peel off. The head and front, the parts that hold your eye, are still fully there.

This is the one that surprises people: a finished head, trunk and front leg with no body. Because this was a young animal, I didn't have many wrinkles or folds to help guide me while drawing.

Therefore I was working with large areas, and I felt that putting pencil down over the whole body, before bringing parts more "into focus", would not help me ascertain how well things were progressing.

So I concentrated on moving from the head to the neck, then building out below the ear and down into the front leg, which was a more definite shape.

Adding layers to get closer to the depth of colour I was aiming for helped me see the elephant begin to appear, which gave me confidence to move to that vast body area. The trunk I kept to the end, a special treat for getting that big block done.

Peel back a little further and only the base layer is left on the leg. That gaping hole, where the trunk will appear, was worrying me, especially with the jaw sticking out like an upside-down traffic cone!

Here the head was beginning to surface from the paper. At this stage I was still finding my way around the form, working out where the darker areas fell to give shape to the head. The deep crease below the eye and above the jaw gave me another orientation point, allowing me to place the eye in the right place.

Above the eye it was more difficult to decide which areas gave an indication of the skull below the surface. There were no distinct shapes here to guide me, just careful observation.

Although it looks like a blob at this "ugly stage", I was aiming to bring the lighter areas forward while at the same time pushing the darker areas back. I try to ignore my brain telling me it doesn't look anything like what I had in mind, and maybe never will. I look for a specific area where I can already see things beginning to work, like that light spot above the eye, which helps to build the illusion of depth. This keeps me going.

And here it is: the ear, exactly where I told you I began. Just that one small patch, rendered properly, with the whole drawing grown outwards from it. Everything you admired in that finished elephant was built on top of these first few marks.

And yes, before even this there was a faint traced outline. Most coloured pencil artists trace from their reference, and I'm no exception. It lets you put your energy into the rendering, the light, shadow and colour, which is where the real skill lives. It's a tool, not a shortcut.

Now read it the other way

So that's the whole drawing taken apart. Nothing magic, just layers, each one doing a job: a traced outline, the ear as an anchor, the head taken most of the way to a finish, the body built forwards from front to back, and finally the ground and the last touches of depth.

Read those steps from the bottom of this page back up to the top, or just watch the loop near the top run forwards, and you have the order I drew it in. That's the thing about a finished drawing. It only looks impossible because you're seeing every layer at once. Take them one at a time and each is well within reach.