When you think you are alone in the Kruger National Park, you’re not! There they were in all their glory. 

Be prepared to see animals:

When you rush through a wild national park you won’t see anything. You have to want to see something and look more carefully. 

Don’t drive quickly. Slow down. The trick is to look through the bush and trees, like having tunnel vision. Tunnel your eyes and focus between things. Then you are more likely to see something. 

Any slight movement is bound betray an animal or bird. But at that particular moment, for us, on seeing the next animal, it wasn’t moving at all. It was standing dead still. Well I hope not! 

It was a lone Wildebeest:

And been alone is a dangerous thing. If lions had found it all alone, they weren’t hesitate to pursue and kill it. 

So it must have had a reason for been all by itself. Maybe it fell asleep and didn’t hear the rest of the herd move away. 

Anyway we moved on again and it was sometime later before we saw… 

An elephant:

We were so please to find an elephant, and so close to the road too. Wasn’t that lucky, we thought. 

It was coming up out of the bush on our right hand side of the car. It looked somewhat restless and that made us feel rather nervous. 

It was checking us out and perhaps deciding to do something about us. 

We didn’t want to get too close to it. You never knew if it would charge us! That would be very scary, especially as it was very tall and huge. It seemed to tower over us from its great height. 

It looked like it was alone. So it could have been a young bull in musk. When it started to paw and scrape the ground with its fore foot, we thought we better get out of there… in a hurry! 

An oil painting:

That elephant was so impressive, that I thought I would like to paint a picture of it from the photos I had taken of it that day. And I did, some time ago and its sold, sorry. But here is a copy photo of that painting. Here it is: 

How I painted it:

You can see from the composition, it isn’t the same as in the photos. The reason been, is that I only used the photos as a visual aid, as an emotional inspiration, and filled in the rest with a little imagination. 

To make the front elephant look larger, I pushed back the background and made the family of elephants and baobab tree look smaller. To give the front elephant more importance, I also misted the background somewhat with dust effects. 

The reality of it is: 

We didn’t actually see the other elephants or the baobab tree that I had put in the painting’s background. I invented them to give the whole scene a tourist attraction and an impression of the wilds of Africa! 

You see, when painting such dramatic paintings, you can’t just sit pretty in front of a dynamic scene and paint it while the elephant is actually rushing up to you. You have to take what you know and create the rest with passion. 

Hope you enjoy it.  

The owner of the painting loves it to bits. Hope he doesn’t mind me showing it to you.