An Elephant a Day

International Elephant Foundation Elephant's World (Thailand)

David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust

Elephant Nature Park (Thailand)

Wildlife Trust of India

Boon Lott's Elephant Sanctuary (Thailand)
Wildlife SOS (India)
The Elephant Sanctuary (Tennessee, U.S.A.)

Fauna & Flora International

Monday, 10 September 2012

Elephant No. 344: Bookplate

I've always been a bookish sort of girl, happiest with my nose stuck in some large tome. Even as children, my siblings and I couldn't bear to be without reading material at any time, and actually fought over who was reading the cereal box at the breakfast table. This is why we all know the full names of chemical acronyms such as BHT—butylated hydroxytoluene, if you're interested, and I didn't have to look that up.

At one point, when I had a lot more time on my hands, I actually made individual bookplates for my favourite books. The designs were based either on the book's subject matter, or on one of its illustrations. It astonishes me now that I ever even thought of doing such a thing.

Because I have such a large personal library, only a fraction of my books have bookplates of any kind. But I do think they're lovely little works of art. So today I thought I might try making an elephant bookplate.

Bookplates are sometimes known as "ex libris", meaning "from the books of" in Latin. They are generally small decorative slips of paper pasted into a book to indicate ownership. Bookplates with simple typography are called "booklabels" to distinguish them from the versions with art.

Ownership marks on books and documents may date back to ancient Egypt and the reign of Amenophis III (1391–1353 B.C.), but formal inscriptions in books didn't become common until the Middle Ages in Europe. This coincided with the advent of early library practices, involving the use of shelfmarks, call numbers, and so forth.

One of the earliest known bookplates, A.D. 1480.
This was pasted into books presented by Brother Hildebrand
Brandenburg to a monastery in Buxheim, Germany.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bookplate2.png

The earliest known printed bookplates were produced in Germany during the late fifteenth century. Although consisting of black ink on white paper, many of these early woodcut bookplates were hand-coloured afterwards, mimicking the look of similar designs in medieval manuscripts. Within a few decades, bookplates were being widely used across Europe, and by the late seventeenth century they had even made their way to North America.

Over the centuries, the designs of bookplates reflected prevailing tastes—oddly enough—in furniture and architecture. Perhaps because a bookplate usually has a frame and often a coat of arms, the bookplate itself often looked something like the panel of a door, cupboard or library wall. Scallop shells, carved greenery, repeating patterns and heraldic animals were all common motifs in bookplates during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, reflecting the artistic sensibilities of their times.

Another popular design of the time was the portrait-plate featuring, as the name suggests, an engraved portrait of the book's owner or author. Similarly common designs were the library interior and book-piles, both of which looked exactly as their names suggest. In bookplates such as this, fancy borders and family crests were largely secondary.

Portrait-plate depicting Samuel Pepys.
Source: http://www.exlibris-art.com/types-of-ex-libris/

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, bookplates had become quite plain again, often featuring a family shield of arms, a motto and a scroll. This pared-down look was to last throughout most of the century, and it wasn't until the early twentieth century that artistic bookplates enjoyed a resurgence. Family crests fell out of favour at this point, and were replaced by more fanciful and allegorical subject matter.

Today, bookplates have become highly collectible, and are often of greater value than the book into which they've been pasted. Although the study and collection of bookplates dates back no more than 150 years, some immense collections have been amassed over the past century. In 1901–1903, for example, the British Museum in London published a catalogue of the 35,000 bookplates collected by Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks. Even more astonishing, the collection of Irene Dwen Andrews Pace—currently housed at Yale University—numbers some 250,000 items.

Bookplate from the library of Edgar
Rice Burroughs, author of Tarzan.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:
Bookplate_of_Edgar_Rice_Burroughs.jpg

Like stamp collectors, some bookplate collectors focus on specific subject matter—scientific, legal, portraits—while others focus on a specific country, period or style. Others collect the work of individual engravers and artists, proof plates, and signed plates. Today there are more than fifty national societies of ex-libris/bookplate collectors worldwide, as well as the worldwide International Federation of Ex-Libris Societies, which organizes a worldwide conference every two years.

For today's elephant, I decided to draw on plain paper with black ink, then hand-colour it if I had time.

I started by drawing a rectangle measuring 7.5 by 10 cm (3 x 4 inches), which is about the size of most bookplates I've seen.

I wasn't sure at first how to fit an elephant into the idea of a bookplate, so I started by drawing an elephant. Luckily, the rest of the design more or less filled itself in. Once I'd drawn the elephant and book, I surrounded it with greenery. Because I had slightly miscalculated the centring of the elephant, I added an extra sprig of greenery on one side.

I went over the sketch with a regular rollerball pen next. The pen wasn't necessarily waterproof; but it was the finest point I had, so I used it instead of the slightly heavier permanent pigment liners I have.

Because I wanted to hand-colour this with watercolours, I heat-set the ink with a hairdryer. Just to be sure it wouldn't run, I drew a few scribbles off to the side and heat-set those as well. When I ran a wet brush over the scribbles and they didn't run, I knew it was okay to paint the main design.

After this, I simply painted everything in. I became quite engrossed in the process, so I didn't photograph it along the way. To give you some idea of the order in which I painted everything, however: I painted the greenery and flowers first, then the book, then the grey of the elephant, then the blue wash in the background, then the pink in the elephant's ears.

It didn't take me long to draw this, but it did take about an hour to paint. I was actually quite happy with the final result, and may even make a few more at some point to put in my favourite elephant-related books.

Elephant Lore of the Day
My friend Jenny reminded me today that poachers don't just kill elephants. They often kill the rangers who protect elephants as well.

Within the past year alone, five Kenyan wildlife rangers have been killed by poachers, along with a depressing 278 elephants. Even more disturbing, poachers are now turning to "quiet" killing methods, leaving poisoned watermelons out for elephants to eat, and shooting animals and rangers with arrows rather than the noisier guns they once used.

Most sources suggest that growing affluence in China and other Far Eastern countries is fuelling an immense upsurge in the illegal killing of elephants for their ivory, as well as the killing of rhinos for their horns. In some countries, rangers are fighting back by actually sawing off the tusks of elephants and the horns of rhinos to make them less attractive to poachers. This unfortunately changes the animals' behaviour—elephants, for example, use their tusks extensively to unearth minerals in the soil—but at least it keeps them alive.

Sadly, even this is not always enough to keep rangers alive. In April this year, despite the sawn-off horns of local rhinos, a South African ranger and policeman were shot and killed by poachers while on patrol.

Asian elephant.
Source: http://blog.c77c.net/who-said-animals-can-not-be-sad-photos/

To Support Elephant Welfare

International Elephant Foundation Elephant's World (Thailand)

David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust

Elephant Nature Park (Thailand)

Wildlife Trust of India

Boon Lott's Elephant Sanctuary (Thailand)
Wildlife SOS (India)
The Elephant Sanctuary (Tennessee, U.S.A.)

Tuesday, 28 August 2012

Elephant No. 331: Lipstick Art

I was cleaning out my makeup bag yesterday and started to throw out some lipstick colours that are either too old, nearly gone, or in colours I never wear. Then I wondered if I could paint with them before tossing them. After all, they're loaded with pigment, and have an oily-waxy base—how different could they be from oil pastels or oil sticks?

It is thought that women in Ancient Mesopotamia (ca. 3000 B.C.) may have been the first to invent and wear lipstick, produced by crushing gemstones and applying them to their lips. Around the same time, women in the Indus Valley Civilization were also applying lip colouring.

By the first century B.C., women in Ancient Egypt used some unusual lip concoctions, including dyes made with iodine and algae, crushed carmine beetles, and ants. Shimmering lipsticks included ground-up fish scales.

Solid lipsticks were invented in the tenth century A.D. by noted Arab Andalusian cosmetologist Abu al-Qasim Al-Zahrawi (Abulcasis). He produced perfumed pigment sticks which had been rolled and pressed in special moulds.

A couple of centuries later, lipstick was banned by religious authorities in Medieval Europe as something sinful, since it was generally worn only by prostitutes. During the sixteenth century in England, however, lip colouring—now made with beeswax and plant-based dyes—began to regain its popularity. Queen Elizabeth I was one of the most avid followers of this particular fashion, whitening her face and colouring her lips a bright red. Interestingly, for a couple of centuries to come, only upper-class women and male actors wore makeup.


"The Darnley Portrait" of Queen Elizabeth I, by an unknown artist, ca. 1575. Collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Darnley_ stage_3.jpg

During the nineteenth century, warnings were issued about some of the dangerous compounds used in makeup, including lipstick. Both lead and vermilion were mentioned, and it wasn't until the end of the century that the first relatively safe commercial lipsticks in Europe were manufactured. Produced by the French company Guerlain, these early sticks were made of deer tallow, castor oil, beeswax, dyes and scent, and were covered in silk paper. Prior to this, women had mixed their own lip colourings at home.

By the 1920s, the use of makeup in Europe and the United States appears to have become acceptable within the fashionable world, quickly trickling down to the wider populace.

Silent movie star Clara Bow, who popularized "bees-stung
lips" in bright red, ca. 1926.
Source: http://www.glamamor.com/2012/03/cinema-
connection-clara-bow-inspires.html

During the first decade of the twentieth century, lipstick was still being sold only in paper tubes, small pots or on tinted papers. It was applied either by brush, or with the tip of the finger. By 1915, metal lipstick cylinders, invented by Maurice Levy, had become available. A small lever on the side of the tube allowed the user to push up the lipstick inside. The first swivel tubes arrived in 1923, patented by James Mason, Jr. of Nashville, Tennessee.

Interestingly, during the Second World War, metal lipstick tubes were replaced by plastic and paper tubes, because metal was needed for the war effort. Lipstick also grew somewhat scarce, because some of lipstick's essential ingredients—including castor oil and petroleum—were unavailable.

Over the past several decades, lipstick has become available in a bewildering array of colours and formulations, including lip stains, lip gloss, long-lasting lipstick, and liquid lip colour. In addition to traditional reds, pinks and earth tones, as well as the pale and white lipsticks first popularized in the 1960s, lipsticks now come in colours such as green, blue and black.

Vogue Italia, August 2009.
Source: http://www.eyeshadowlipstick.com/date/2010/11/page/26/

Today's lip colourings contain wax, oils, emollients and other substances such as scent and flavourings. Waxes such as beeswax and candelilla wax give sold lipstick its structure. Oils and fats such as olive oil, mineral oil, and cocoa butter are added to make the lipstick glossy. Dyes include both organic and inorganic pigments. Shimmery lipsticks often contain mica, silica, synthetic pearlescent particles and even fish scales.

Although I found almost no art created with lipstick in my online search, I did come across some rather charming work by artist Natalie Irish, who "paints" with lipstick kisses.

Portrait of Marilyn Monroe by Natalie Irish.
Source: http://www.visualnews.com/2011/07/14/artist-
makes-portraits-with-lipstick-kisses/

For today's elephant, I had the following colours to play with. I now regret that I threw out a few other colours several weeks ago.

My first thought was to draw on paper with these, as you'd draw on a mirror, then I realized that I also have a lipstick brush. So I decided to use that instead. I also have paintbrushes, of course, but I wasn't sure I wanted them gunked-up with lipstick.

I was going to work on paper, but then I thought it would be more interesting to work on a small canvas board. I chose one measuring a modest 15 x 20 cm (6 x 8 inches).

Since I was working with something as bizarre as lipstick, I decided to start from something realistic. I chose this photograph:

Savannah elephant, Kruger National Park, South Africa, 2005.
Photo: Felix Andrews
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Elephant_side-view_Kruger.jpg

Before I used any of the tubes, I cleaned them all off with a tissue. This not only removes a bit of the ick factor—related to your canvas becoming covered in something that may have touched your lips—but also provides a nice, fresh source of pigment. To me, it was a bit like preparing a pigment stick.

I started by using a medium brown called "Fabulous Fig" to make a light outline sketch. I didn't bother with an underlying pencil drawing, because I had no idea how I would ever erase pencil afterwards.

Already I could see the limitations of this medium. Or perhaps it was more the brush that was the issue. If the brush was overloaded with colour, it kind of smeared around. If there wasn't enough colour on the tip of the brush, I got a very soft-focus effect.

Next, I added something called "Blackberry". I discovered that, if I loaded mostly the tip of the brush, I could draw fine lines. The colour petered out quickly, but at least fine lines were possible.

My next addition was a red called "Très Très Dior". Although I like red, this colour looks terrible on me—but nice on my elephant. This is when I began to notice that the consistency of the lipstick made quite a difference to how the pigment reacted on the canvas. The red, for example, was very smooth and very creamy. This made it more blendable than any of the other colours, but also less likely to hold a fine line.

After this, I simply kept painting with different colours of lipstick, until I was happy with the final design. I also discovered a sort of pointillist technique which allowed me to dot fine lines of lipstick with the tip of the brush in order to produce a continuous delicate line.

If you decide to try this with lipstick otherwise destined for the trash, here are a few helpful tips:

1. Keep tissues handy. Not only is it a good idea to wipe the surface of the lipstick before starting, but you may also want to remove some colour before applying your brush to the canvas or paper. You will likely want to wipe your brush in between colours as well.

2. I used a lipstick brush, but I did try a very fine paintbrush at one point. It was a bit underwhelming. Not only did it not hold enough paint to be worth the trouble, but it also didn't make lines that were any finer than the tip of my lipstick brush.

3. The quality of the lipstick brush is immaterial. I used one that I bought years ago for less than ten dollars, and it was perfect. The main thing is that the brush be square enough at the tip to allow for a razor edge.

4. The quality of the lipstick is also immaterial. Although the Dior lipstick cost well over twenty dollars, it was actually the most tricky of the tubes I had. The creaminess that makes it pleasant to wear also makes it more smeary and unpredictable.

5. Because this is a medium with a wax-oil base, it will smear quite readily. Although I have no idea how archival lipstick paintings might be, I'm guessing it's probably a good idea to let it dry as if it were an oil painting. In this case, because the layers are so thin, a few days should do it.

6. If you don't want to use a brush, obviously you can just draw directly on the surface with your lipstick tube. You could even blend it afterwards with a brush or your fingers, depending on the effect you want. I used only the lipstick brush to blend my drawing, because I feared getting lipstick all over the place if I let it migrate to my hands.

It took me a little under an hour to produce this drawing, and it was actually an interesting experience once I got the hang of working with lipstick and a lipstick brush. Prior to this, I had only ever thought of lipstick art as something scrawled on a bathroom mirror in movies. Now that I know you can actually make finely shaded drawings with "lippy", I may not throw out these tubes after all. You just won't see them on my face.

Elephant Lore of the Day
I've written before about the Dasara Festival in Mysore and an elephant named Arjuna, but there are many other elephants used in the festival with equally interesting stories. Two of my favourites are Gajendra and Mahendra.

Gajendra is considered an expert in making other elephants fall into line. His imposing size and manner have also made him a natural at capturing problem elephants in the wild.

One day, park rangers were chasing a wild elephant, with Gajendra in the lead. Suddenly, Gajendra stopped—a behaviour that is almost unheard-of for an elephant in hot pursuit. When rangers approached Gajendra to see why he'd stopped, they found an unconscious man lying in the grass. Although Gajendra had let a wild elephant escape, he had saved a human.

Mahendra was a less intimidating and more tenderhearted sort. He was very fond of his trainer, who happened to be something of a drunkard. Every night, when his trainer did not return, Mahendra would actually go in search of the man, eventually retrieving him from one of several village taverns.

Dasara Festival procession, Mysore.
Photo: © K.L. Kamat
Source: http://www.kamat.com/kalranga/prani/
elephants/dasara_elephants.htm

To Support Elephant Welfare

David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust

International Elephant Foundation Elephant's World (Thailand)

Elephant Nature Park (Thailand)

Wildlife Trust of India

Boon Lott's Elephant Sanctuary (Thailand)
Wildlife SOS (India)
The Elephant Sanctuary (Tennessee, U.S.A.)

Wednesday, 15 August 2012

Elephant No. 318: Soft Pastels

I have oil pastels, Conté crayons, and pastel pencils, but I've never used soft pastels, so I thought I'd try them for today's elephant.

I covered the pastel medium in my post on pastel pencils, so I'll just describe what I did in today's post.

I found this set of 24 soft pastels at an art store for twelve dollars. They're obviously not top-of-the-line, but sixty-five dollars seemed a bit much to spend on a medium I wasn't even sure I'd like.

I thought it might be interesting to use these on black paper, so I also bought a pack of black paper made for pastels.

Because I was planning to use crazy colours, I thought I should work from a photograph, at least to start. This is the photograph I chose:

African elephant in Tanzania.
Source: http://www.kilimanjarotanzaniasafaris.com/craters_safari_flora_fauna_kenya.htm

I started by making a rough sketch with a medium-turquoise pastel. These are definitely a lot softer than Conté crayon, and somewhat softer than pastel pencil. But they didn't explode in a puff of pastel dust, as I had vaguely expected.

It looked a bit like an elephant wearing a First World War gas mask at this point, but I pressed on, adding a darker blue and some white for the tusk.

I added a bit more colour, then thought I should try blending with a blending stump, since these pastels are supposed to be so blendable.

I wasn't sure I loved the look of the blending, but I did like the way the colours stood out against the black. I was actually a bit surprised that even the darker colours showed up against black.

I had originally concentrated on shades of blue, but now decided to add other colours, mostly just to experiment. By now, I had gotten into a rhythm of blending and drawing at the same time.

It looked a bit strange with all these colours showing as a top layer, so I began toning them down by adding back the original shades of blue over top.

To finish up, I added some shading and fine lines with black. I also added some fine green lines for the elephant's mouthful of grass.

This drawing took me about two hours, which was about what I'd expected. It's a slightly messy medium, but it's manageable as long as you blow any dust away, and keep something handy to wipe your fingers.

One thing I didn't like is that it's not easy to make fine lines with soft pastels—although I promise that the black lines look finer in the actual piece than in my photographs. In retrospect, I think I should have left more of the black paper showing through, rather than adding black afterwards. But for truly fine lines, I could have used pastel pencils or Conté crayons. I just didn't want to mix media.

In the end, I quite liked soft pastels. I don't say that lightly, because I usually hate having chalky fingers. Mostly, I think I just liked the way the colours popped against the black. In fact, since I now have a whole pad of black paper and a bit of extra time, I might just play with these a bit more tonight.

Elephant Lore of the Day
One of the most important things to an elephant is water. A fully grown elephant requires about 225 litres (50 gallons) of water a day, which can be a challenge during Africa's dry season. Trekking across desert sands, dry riverbeds and rocky landscapes, elephants will travel many kilometres in search of water.

Although we most commonly think of elephants drinking at waterholes, elephants are the only animal in Africa that will actually dig for water. Burrowing their trunks several feet into the ground, elephants will drill down until they hit an underground spring.

Once they hit water, they suck it up through their trunks and spray it into their mouths. They will drink up to ten litres (two gallons) at a time. When the elephants finish drinking and move on, other animals will rush forward to drink at the open wells left behind.

It is thought that elephants teach one another about the most likely places to find water, making the loss of an older elephant's knowledge catastrophic. When older elephants are killed, the younger members of a herd can often be left rudderless, leading to anti-social behaviour as well as a lack of survival skills.

African elephants crossing Damaraland, Namibia, 2007.
Photo: © Michael Poliza
Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-450703/Elephantoms-desert-
Extraordinary-images-herd.html

To Support Elephant Welfare

Elephant sanctuaries (this Wikipedia list allows you to click through to information

on a number of sanctuaries around the world)