10. Wrinkles on Animal Skin

You've successfully indicated textures of a number of different surfaces, mostly from what you can see in front of you. Now I want you to use a drawing from a magazine (below) and pick out what it is that makes that surface convincing. Look at this drawing closely. What makes it elephant skin? How can you simplify it?

Folds in material usually follow lines caused by gravity and the furrows flow in one direction, but with elephant skin the creases and wrinkles criss-cross one another. Also the shapes of the body and the bones underneath have some bearing on how the skin is stretched.

If you copy the skin of any animal look very closely at the texture and analyse what is happening to make it characteristic of that animal.

Exercise 10

Copy or trace my example of elephants, showing the simplified texture which indicates what we've seen close up.

Don't forget the shading behind the ears and on the far leg. Go on, get a piece of sycamore from Janik for this!