A2 Maternal Elephant 1

Part of my A2 level exam in 2008 with title "Maternal". At A2 you get three weeks prep for a three day, fifteen-hour-total exam (read: three days of sitting on my arse drawing all day). I decided to stick firmly by my oath from last year not to draw anything manmade whatsoever, having managed it in my A2 project, and since humans were off the cards too, I looked at maternal animals. I went through a bunch of ideas with different animals, playing with ideas of having a mammal, bird, fish and marsupial - or something - in one piece, but ended up, after some rhinos, looking pretty much exclusively at elephants, an animal I'd never seriously drawn in my life before.
So. These are photos of my artwork, so not as high-quality as a scan would have been, but they've been cleaned up as best I could, which is not actually very well in the case of the stuff higher than head height on the Art dept's walls. I got 100% marks for this, pushing my previous B at AS up to an A for the whole A level.

This was in fact the second elephant I drew; the first wasn't great, so I haven't uploaded it, but I was happy with this one. To keep that maternal aspect, I composited two different photos with a cow and a calf each, to make a single one that fitted the protective vein I was going for.

Chalks (pretty much like blackboard chalks, blending by hand) on black paper.

Image is © to me (=apocalypsebunny)