The idea for this drawing started when I took a digital tour trough the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (it looks so awesome, I hope to see it in real life some day..).

The tour starts with this Elephant in the central hall. I found it to be a beautiful display with the elephant. It almost looks like the elephant is on some kind of epic journey. Walking trough the deserts on a quest to a watery oasis.. But the truth is.. the elephant is dead and put on display in a museum.
(With reminds me of a quote by Kenneth Hudson: "a tiger in a museum is a tiger in a museum, not a tiger")

Anyhow.

As you can see the elephant in the drawing has the same posture as the elephant in the museum. I thought a bit about where the animal would travel if it could. Inspired by artworks of others I put the animal in this surrealist-feeling environment I created with this pointillist-style-fineliner-technique that I'm using nowadays. (Still with a simple 0.7mm fineliner from the supermarket in this piece tho..)

Made while watching The walking Dead ;)

'Elephants Dream' is now  also available on http://society6.com/hannighan :)

Thanks for watching!