Painting the elephant exhibit of the AMNH

February 26, 2024 Nohelia Vázquez

It feels like it is mandatory if you travel to New York to pay a visit to either the Met or the AMNH (ideally both!). In my case, I loooove science and nature museums so I picked this one for my first visit.

The zoological exhibit was one of my favorites and I immediately decided to paint the elephants in my sketchbook.

amnh elephant exhibit

The picture I used as reference for my sketchbook page

I was on an experimenting mood so I decided to do a halfway unfinished spread where the parts that I wanted to focus on less would not get painted at all and would remain a pencil sketch.

Initially I wanted to do this with an elephant as well but did not commit to that. Instead I have two finished elephants, one finished 3/4ths of the way, and then the background in pencil.

My idea was to leave even more parts unfinished of the upper elephant but in the end I just left some pencil marks and didn't add all the finishing details

watercolor elephant sketch with background in pencil

I did like the background in pencil, but now I think I could have add more

I started the process by placing where each elephant would be with a general shape, and then I took my time refining the sketch.

first elephant pencil sketch

I was in the process of making the basic shapes

Then I started bettering the shapes

Then once I was satisfied with it, I started the painting process elephant by elephant, taking care of letting an area to be completely dry before painting next to it.

baby elephant in watercolor

The baby elephant I painted as detailed as I could

It is not my favorite sketch looks wise, but it is one of my more technically impressive ones so far. I recorded most of the process and decided to upload the the video to share.

watercolor elephants painting