elephants!

My drawing II final required me to create a series of pieces for a single concept. My teacher wanted me to find an animal behavior that related to a human emotion and base my concept on that. After doing a lot of research, I decided to create the drawings based on the way in which elephants display grief. I think this video explains it much better then I could:





I also found that psychologists have broken down the grieving process into five steps: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. So each one of the drawings I did represents a different stage. In them, there is a main character, a girl, going through the grieving process. Her arm is an elephant's trunk, meant to represent the girl's inability to let go of the individual whom she is mourning over, and also as a reference to the use of an elephant's trunk to touch the remains of other elephants who have died. The elephant bones in the drawings are meant to represent the deceased. I don't know how well I pulled any of this off (haha) but in general I enjoyed doing them. Graphite, watercolor, watercolor pencil and ink pen were all used on watercolor paper for this series.



STAGE 1: DENIAL



STAGE 2: ANGER



STAGE 3: BARGAINING



STAGE 4: DEPRESSION



STAGE 5: ACCEPTANCE

a perfect circle - magdalena