Painted Elephant

I find the interactions between elephants and humans to be fascinating.  The studies and stories are uplifting and heartbreaking in turn, and the more we learn about the last trio of holdout species from a family that once spanned the globe, the more questions we find ourselves faced with.

Here’s one for you to ponder today:

Given that Asian Elephants recognize their own reflections, do the painted elephants of India ever catch a glimpse of themselves in a mirror or shiny surfaces or still waters and think “Damn, I look good!“?

 

 

Click through for the full-res.  I release these free bits of line art under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

You are allowed and indeed encouraged to do whatever you want with the piece(s) (use, reuse, abuse, remix, share, and of course, embroider), just follow these two simple rules:

1) Give me credit (a link back is always appreciated- that way, everyone else knows they can use it too)
2) Don’t make a profit off any use or modification of my work.

To be fair, I won’t sue you or anything if you don’t give me credit- I’ll just feel all hurt, and no one wants that.  Also to be fair, should you really want to use them in a profit-making venture (ie: stitch it on something you then sell in your etsy store, use it as a print for your own fabric line, etc.), talk to me and maybe we can work something out so everybody wins.  Should you want to say thanks, leave a comment and/or tell a friend or six, or show me what you do with it ’cause that’s all sort of inspiring.

You can find a reminder/introduction to embroidery, including basic stitches and a by-no-means exhaustive list of methods of transferring patterns to fabric in this post (there’s also a good round-up here and another one here). You can find the rest of my patterns under the Embroidery Patterns category.

It’s been a while since we’ve had an embroidery pattern, eh?  I’ve lacked inspiration, I guess.  Got any ideas out there?