It seems like it’s all bad news these days about elephants. One elephant is slaughtered every 15 minutes for its ivory to serve unscrupulous scum, mainly in the far east like in China and Vietnam. (By the way, those countries themselves have good people fighting the fight but they are sadly outnumbered and out bidded). That’s 35,000 plus elephants gone every year. However, I like to focus on the people who are doing some good and I count many of my wildlife artist friends among that number. Check out this page from Julie Askew and feel free to search out the following artists who do such great work

http://julieaskew.blogspot.com.au/p/projecttanzania-october-22-november-2.html

Anyhow, with this in mind, I have a small scratchboard completed. It’s of an elephant I saw in Chobe National Park in Botswana. I’ve tried to create the high contrast of shiny wet hide on the elephant as it is in a river drinking.

Elephant wading

My previous blog was about a march for elephants and rhinos to highlight the old yet growing problem of poaching. Again I reiterate the catch cry “Not on our watch”!!! Let’s make a difference.

Life has been very interesting for me recently to say the least. Firstly I have a show on at the moment called “The Art of Conservation”. It is a collaboration between myself and Kerryn Hocking who is a wonderful pastel artist. I have 18 pieces up for sale, all but two of them are scratchboards (my two pastels and a large scratchboard below have already sold)  and she has 16 lovely pastels – all wildlife and much of the money raised will go to the Adelaide Zoo’s conservation programs. The gallery is located at the entrance to the zoo and is called the Santos Conservation Centre. Exhibition open until the end of March, 9.30 am – 4.45 pm

I will also be writing an entire magazine (normally I write magazine articles but this will be the whole lot). More information to follow as it develops.

Finally, for the last few weeks I have had the pleasure of hosting one of the world’s greatest scratchboard artists in my home, the awesome Rod Leisure aka RodMan. This guy lives and breathes art and has done some plein air pieces as well as studio and demo work while he has been here. Below is a selection of his work while he’s been here. None of these pieces have more than about three hours on them so he works fast. He might take them home to Colorado and tighten them up but to be quite honest, he’s all about the fun he has doing it in the first place. It’s all about the process, even more than the result. I often impress this upon people – if you don’t enjoy the process why are you doing it. This man has lots of fun creating art.

Firstly, this is RodMan at our ‘famous’ Adelaide Balls.

And now on site working on some working fishing industry boats at North Arm

This is the piece that came out of that visit

He spent a few days at Victor Harbor and painted the tram which takes tourists over to Granite Island

A couple of trips to the Railway Museum in Port Adelaide saw these two pieces done on site

Now, let’s have some serious fun. The afore-mentioned Kerryn Hocking organised two demonstrations (which RodMan did for free) and these pieces came from those demos

If things could get any better, well, they did. My 18 year old son who is a good artist in his own right did a collaboration piece with RodMan and they came up with this Mad Scientist. It’s still to be finished but I’m sure you get the idea.

Finally, RodMan came to my exhibition opening and saw some of my orangutan pieces there so we decided to do a collaboration image as well and came up with this fun piece – again it’s only two and a half hours work drawn freehand on clayboard with ink added with an airbrush and a couple of small bristle brushes, removed with a fibreglass brush and a blade and fun had by all. I’m pretty certain my style has come through quite well.