In search of Elephants

So the day is finally here, The elephants are all over London! There are elephants at Heathrow, Brixton and St Pancreas but in the most part they are in Central London.

They are in plazas and on streets, some are hiding inside buildings and undercover, some are happily herding in the parks and green spaces. Taking in the colours of Covent Garden Market, going shopping in Selfridge's, having a picnic in Green Park, people watching in Trafalgar Square, going to a movie in Leicester square, relaxing by the water. I could go on and on.

The map for all the events can be found on the Elephant Parade London website, or indeed here:

http://www.elephantparadelondon.org/images/elephant_parade_london_routemap.pdf

My elephant 'Greetings from the Jungle' has been sponsored by European Land and is no. 103 on the map. He can be found at 31 Harbet Road, Paddington a mere stones throw from Paddington Railway Station or Edgware tube. As far as I can tell he is in fact down near the canal in the middle of the new developments rather than right on Harbet Road.

I made an event on Facebook, please feel free to invite all your friends and contacts. Additionally I will post all the photos I get of my elephant (or if you like of you and my elephant) there on the event and on my website (either in the main body of it or here). Either post the photos yourself on the event page or send them to me at gemma@gemmacumming.com.

http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/event.php?eid=113760665329125&index=1

If you want to facebook friend me, feel free to ask however I usually don't befriend just anyone, sorry but I'd rather know you in person somehow. However the event is being run through my facebook fan page and I'm always happy to have new fans. You'd get all of the important art related information there anyway rather than what I ate for breakfast this morning.

http://www.facebook.com/reqs.php#!/pages/Gemma-Cumming/14653030250

Finally my elephant was one of 80 chosen to be made into a miniature. As yet no sign of it online to buy but there are pop up shops in four London locations including: Selfridge's, 36 Carnaby Street, 80 Oxford Street and Greenwich Central Market. However if it is anything like the Amsterdam miniatures they will come in a selection of sizes from about 10cm to 20cm. I will post online images of people with my miniature as well. :)

The parade goes on until the 23^rd June when all the elephants are rounded up from their sightseeing and have a week long party in the grounds of the Chelsea Royal Hospital. It is open to the public and I plan on popping down that week so I can see all the elephants together. I will be visiting my elephant before then however and there is a meet artist day on the 22^nd May, so it is all go go go. On the 3^rd is the auction (you can already express your interest in bidding for an elephant on the Elephant Parade Website!) and on the 4^th we say goodbye to them all.

And while it is far from over I would like to quickly express my thanks to the Elephant Family for the opportunity, to European Land for sponsoring my elephant (especially while there are plenty of unsponsored elephants out there in the wilds of London, seriously poke your bosses and organisations and grab one, you'll get green points if nothing else), to those crazy guys at Ecomovers who delivered my elephant in all that snow and took him away for a trip around the country before getting back to London (made him into a real postcard there) and everyone else who supported me, read my blog and answered all my questions.
(All photos are of my elephant as he progressed)

It's Not Finished.................... It's Finished

Well the elephant is finished. It was taken away at 8am on Monday and I then proceeded to get back into pyjama bottoms and spent the rest of the day watching Battlestar Galactica and tidying my room. Heavenly. I also made a long list (on the back of an envelope, the best place for important notes) with as many of the things I needed or wanted to do as I could remember.

I meant to write this entry on Sunday night, then Monday but I was so knackered that only on Tuesday I got round to starting it and I quickly abandoned it for more Sci-Fi and some of the more visually orientated tasks on my list. Surprisingly I find the writing as tortured as it seemed when I wrote the first draft is not as awful as I feared, although it still contains much rambling and non relevant material. But isn't that what a blog is meant to be at least in part? I should know better than to watch the same programme all day, my mind will become inevitably obsessed with it and I won't be able to think of anything else except plot twists and character profiles until I have exhausted my supply of it. So while now I am pretty clear of it, back when I was trying to write this the first time I was having to battle my brain to think about art.

Hmm, lets get back to the point of this entry.

So the last two weeks of painting the elephant have been hectic. I have been getting up at 6am in an attempt to start work at 7:30. In practice this has ended up more often with me hitting snooze twice and then not starting till 8, but it's not bad considering. Actually the sheer length of my day from 8am to 6pm reminded me a lot of the last few months of University which is not something I have had to do (and enjoyed) since then. While it was immensely stressful (one can have too many dreams about the elephant getting lost, destroyed or coming alive) it was also extremely focusing and turned into quite an obsessive exercise. However the stress was intensified by the unknown time factors including; sections of detail that took far longer than you would have expected or sections that you expected to take ages was done in next to no time. It made working out how long certain elements would take impossible to guess. It also made when (or even whether) it was going to be finished change on a daily basis. In the end he was finished at about 10pm on Sunday which considering what could have happened wasn't that bad at all.

Ahh no matter! It is done now and I'm pretty damn pleased with him. There are still aspects to him I think I could have done better, but isn't that always the case? Plus he came together as a coherent whole which, considering that I was working from drawings and an image in my head on a 3D and (to say the least) unusual surface rather than a photograph on a flat canvas as I am used to, was wonderful. Oddly I wasn't even that wrenched to see him go. The studio has space in it again and I was glad to have it all finished. I'm looking forward to seeing him in situ more than I am sad to see him go. In fact strangely enough it was my mother that was most upset to see him go. Go figure. Apparently she's going to miss seeing him stare from out of the conservatory at her in the mornings.

Below is an image of the both of us together, taken when the men came to pick him up. I'm not sure what possessed us to have him facing backwards but it was at 8am so maybe me and my Dad were still half asleep. There are a ton of other photos on the Flickr set I made for him here is the link.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/noblueskies/sets/72157623599724090/

PS: You get geek points if you recognise and laugh at the title.

(I think I used too many brackets in this post)

Arggg!

Arggg!

Less writing, more painting

So there really is little to say about the elephant this time. I have been working hard on it, in fact more so than before as I have been trying to stretch as much painting time into the day as possible. Only about a week ago I had my finish date fixed (8^th March) and there is still a fair bit to do, I really hope I won't have to pull a few all nighters to try to get it done. When it was arranged it seemed like a fair amount of time and enough to get what looks to be very little done, unfortunately it is also some of the trickiest and most detailed work. I am also slightly concerned that I don't like some bits of the most recent developments, granted they are unfinished but still when they are done I doubt I will have any time to paint over or redo them. Scary stuff all and all and 'The Fear' has definitely set in, I am even considering get up at 6:00am so I can start working at 7:30 tomorrow. Yes I am MAD, this is evidence of the sheer level of fear I am under.

Anyway here are the most recent photos.

'Phant-tastic

So I promised another posting on the elephant in my previous blog post. But alas I find myself with very little to say. It has been going well and the increase in daylight hours has been quite a shock to me truth be told, so now I am happily working till 4:30pm when before I could barely get myself going again after lunch (knowing I would have only an hour at best to work in).

So the elephant, well it is resplendent in various shades of green. I have got to about the belly level although there are still aspects that I need to get back to. It is a process of layering, taking the furthest away points in a scene and painting them first then working forward remembering to put down enough base colours so that I don't stall myself. And while this was prevalent during the last posting I have worked into quite a good system and am surprising myself with how much I get done.

The trunk is only partially finished as of yet and while I ache to get on with these little flowers I have other more pressing concerns that need dealing with first. His eyes I also want to get on with but they also are low priority as yet and I still have the bizarre notion of doing one blue and the other orange that I need to work out before I deal with them.

My mother has become quite enamoured with the whole thing, actually wanting to use a camera to produce images to send to relatives (She distrusts technology and is not the usual choice for wielding a camera). She has even named the elephant 'Edward' and since I completed the mouth area has decided he looks like he is happy about what I am doing to him. It is a little far for me but I don't mind it and I will admit happily that he is starting to look less dopey the more paint is on him and indeed he seems to have developed a smile, goodness knows from where. He will not however be named 'Edward'.

I also realise that I started this post saying I didn't have much to say. I think we will all be glad that I didn't, for goodness knows how long it would have been had I had.

Finally I will say that I have decided that although I like the idea of the grand reveal, there is not really any sensible reason to not show off a little how far he has come along. The pictures range from the last entry to today. By no means exhaustive but a far approximation. I hope to have at least one more entry of him finished but maybe I'll find something else before then. Oh and I should mention that there is a new mini site with elephant info about the parade up now: http://www.elephantparadelondon.org/index.html

Elephantine Update

AHHH! I wrote a blog entry and then conveniently forgot to post it. Oops. Well here it is, revised and updated a little unfortunately you will have to cope with older pictures of what's been going on.

4 days after receiving my elephant I was still drawing in my design! Usually a painting of a similar size to it would take an hour or so to do this so I really wasn't expecting it to take so long. I will admit that without the use of an OHP and having to do it entirely freehand must have put a crimp in my style. The fact is that there is no original photograph, only a roughly sketched design and what's in my head. The design while it took influence from many sources could not be projected well, even if there was room to do so.

Additionally the design requires that each side of the elephant be the same image with a few alterations so I have found myself spending more time walking around the 'phant than drawing on it. Happily I finished the drawing just a few days later and started painting him on day 5 of receipt.


It has been quite a challenge so far, I had not anticipated a few things and they came as a little bit of a shock. For one the drying time of acrylics is very different to oils, far faster and while I had used acrylics before and realised this would be the case I had forgotten quite how fast they can dry. This has taken some getting used to and has forced me to rethink a few minor details. But it has also come as a godsend for (and I know no idea why I didn't think of this) in many areas the paint has required a second or even a third coat to produce a properly opaque and even covering which has slowed me down a tad. But the days get longer and the work is now progressing at a good pace. I actually think I am still on target.


I hope to write another entry sometime next week or early the week after with a photo of an almost (or even finished) trunk, bearing in mind that the entire upper section of the 'phant will have to be done before I even get that far. But for now you will have to cope with the drawn version.

A parade under my hat

OK so the big reveal.. Well if you've scrolled ahead to look at the pictures you may already have a good idea what is going on.

As I have mentioned to many of you insisting on finding out what I have been so secretive about, I did tell many of you about this when I was applying in September time. I know it was a useless hint but I was so excited about it I was half convinced I'd jinx myself.

Well today I had a fibreglass elephant delivered.

As some of you might remember I was rambling at one time about applying to paint an elephant and as some you may have guessed by now I have indeed been chosen to do just that.
I found out in November time that my design had been approved and all that was needed to be done was sort out a few logistics. I also decided then to not say anything until I actually had the elephant under my roof.

Now I have to say although the delivery date had been fixed for about a week, after all this snowfall we'd had I imagined that it wouldn't make it. While I'm very glad it did, the delivery men had a whale of a time getting it through my back garden into the conservatory and even more fun trying to get their van full of elephants back out of my road. Apparently Wimbledon just isn't all that bad snow wise, after this weekend they might change their minds. Unfortunately their early and slightly unexpected arrival caught me alone in the house (unusual with this weather) and sitting on my own foot (literally! Stairs at speed with a dead foot... dangerous) as a result my plan to document the hauling of the beast through the snow was left upstairs with my camera.

So for those of you who still have no idea what I'm talking about.
In the summer of 2010 there will be a parade of elephants throughout London. Approximately 200 fibreglass elephants painted by artists and celebrities will be scattered around the city. Not only creating a talking point and a colourful fun scene but also highlighting the plight of the Asian elephant.

I was privileged in 2007 to see something similar happen in Bath with pigs.

More information can be found here: http://www.elephantparade.com/london/ and indeed here http://www.elephantfamily.org/

And that is all I had under my hat.
Expect occasional photos on twitter and maybe even the occasional blog entry chronicling it's journey from white to glorious technicolour.