Yeah, I know it’s a rhino.

There’s quite the story behind this image. It’s an older one. I did this drawing for my high school art class when I was 17 years old (I’m now 38). A friend of mine who was taking art classes for an easy credit was rather disgusted with how accurately and realistically the image came out and kept calling it an elephant instead of a rhino. The name stuck.

When I was first finished the image, I wasn’t too thrilled with how it came out. There are some problems with the proportions, and it was bugging me, but the graphite was too ground into the paper for me to do anything about it. It took me years to finally decide it was a good piece. My parents’ on the other hand, liked it right away and put it in a large frame (the drawing itself is a full size piece of mayfair cover, approximately 18in x 24in in I believe) and mounted it on a ledge that ran across our front entranceway. A few years later it fell the nine feet to smash on the main floor. I thought for sure the drawing was going to come out of the frame in ribbons. It did not. Though it DID have a few good gashes going through it in a few places. You won’t be able to notice them on this digital capture.

I decided to post the drawing here. The mayfair cover is getting quite old and has yellowed noticeably. I don’t think the original is going to last that much longer. A quick snap shot and some photoshopping to deal with the yellowing and voilà, here you go.

This is the very last pice of my older and sometimes more juvenile works that I’ll be posting online for the sake of completeness. You can see the rest of these works here, here and here.