Elephants

Yay! It's time for another challenge over at AAA Cards - this week the theme is Bare Naked - we are looking for one layer cards. The design team has created some amazing creations (as usual!) so please check them out - you can get to the challenge by clicking on the game image below:

I took my inspiration for the card from two places: the baby in photo and the fact that I needed to make a card for my co-worker and his wife who just delivered their very first baby boy. Here it is:

It is a very simple card with the baby elephant stamped three times - the stamp itself is a really old one from Fiskars. I then coloured the elephants with Copics - this is still fairly new to me so I kept it to two shades per elephant and then I outlined them in W1 to create some dimension. The sentiment is from the Clearly Besotted Sentimental Type - with the hashtags added in by yours truly. When it was done, I decided that it was a little bit too plain so I added some Wink of Stella to the elephants.

I will also link this card to the current Less Is More Challenge that is also about one layer cards featuring animals.

A while back, I promised to share a few of my holiday pics from Tanzania, and today seemed like a perfect opportunity to share a couple of elephant pics. I saw a lot of elephants while I was there - we got quite close to some of them when we were in our safari jeep, and we even had a couple walk into camp one evening to drink water from the open top water reservoir!!! Apparently, this is quite a regular occurrence but it was very impressive to see them so close. 

The first picture shows a baby elephant with its mother and another member of the troop. It was so cute - our guide estimated it to be no more than a few months old.

The next two pictures show two elephants that are locking their tusks and wrapping their trunks around each other. At first, I thought they were fighting but then the guide explained that it was a friendship greeting - it went on for about five minutes but I could have watched them forever - it was so beautiful and one of my favourite moments from the safari (trust me - the pictures don't do it justice!). The interaction between the two elephants (one obviously much bigger) walking off together to join the rest of the troop who were moving on to greener pastures.

A final (albeit very sad) thought on elephants... one of the things that I learned when I was in Tanzania is that an elephant is killed every 15 minutes for its ivory by poachers. I was shocked because I thought that the world had become more aware of this issue and that ivory trade had been stopped - apparently it was just moved underground to the black market. I don't know what I can do to help this other than to encourage people to travel to Africa to see these wonderful animals so that people can understand that through tourism there is more benefit to keeping them alive than killing them.

Thanks so much for stopping by!!!
Jill