Elephant & Serengeti landscape
Jan 2016
A family of elephants traipses, single-file, through a dusty Serengeti scene in the distance, the silhouettes of towering Baobab trees to their backs and the glowing orange sun over their heads. In the foreground, a rock hyrax scowls from its perch.
This is one of my favorite papercuts that I've ever done, and to this day it hangs on the wall of my bedroom. I loved the challenge of fitting the landscape scene inside the elephant's head; I loved working on the details of the trunk; and it was overall great practice creating a realistic representation of my favorite animal (as they say, you think you know what something looks like until you try to draw it).
On top of that I managed to sneak in a hyrax, another favorite animal of mine and one of the closest living relative of elephants (my inner bio nerd loves that tidbit about this piece).
A hyrax watches from the side
Rock hyraxes (Image from San Diego Zoo)
Another fun fact about this one is that the frame it's displayed in is actually not a frame at all, but a fully functional clock. I learned after finishing this piece that circular frames are incredibly hard to come by. One of my best friends had the ingenious idea of using a clock as a frame instead, and in almost no time I found a $15 clock with the perfect proportions and just the look and coloration that I wanted. The guts are all still there, right behind the artwork.