I started with the elephant in this painting. I put down a medium gray in the darkest areas and a light gray in the lightest areas. I darkened in the main body/legs area and trunk and put a layer of white down for the tusks. As you can see from the first picture the tusk on the right was fairly far out and I decided I didn't like it there so I moved it further in. I added some dark wrinkles along the trunk, forehead and ear areas and then I let the whole picture dry. Next, I added the background in browns and yellows trying to mimic the African savannah. I was trying to go for an elephant stepping out of the dust. I added more highlights and darkened the shadows and I added a bit of brown. Elephants are pretty dirty after all. This one was fairly easy to get done and probably took me 4 hours which includes 2 hours of drying time.