Project Description
I’ve been asked to do elephant henna designs many times at fairs and festivals. This might have been the first one that I actually really loved, where I thought the elephant came out really well.
This elephant henna design features mehndi style design on the elephant’s forehead, flowers in the background, and a matching squiggle on the wearer’s finger and the elephant’s trunk.
Perhaps you, like me, have spent far too long considering what makes elephants both so awesome and such a pain to convey in henna. Perhaps you, like me, spent all that time, and yet still fell short of what you thought should be possible for all the potential there is in an elephant-inspired mehndi design. In case you, like me, obsess over these things and are seeking a greater understanding of all things henna and elephants, I will share my musings on why this design worked where others I’ve done (which were also pretty okay) have always seemed not quite as great for one reason or another.
The Layout – Just doing the elephant’s face, and having the trunk go down the middle finger, avoids all the placement awkwardness of that popular-but-terribly-ugly elephant henna design that has been making the rounds on the internet for somewhere near a decade… Perhaps you’ve seen it? The trunk goes up the index finger, which means the head is all squished down flat and weird in order to make that happen, and the trunk is too long… I’ve done my own attempts to redo that whole-body-with-trunk-up-the-finger placement idea for the elephant, and they were a bit more successful, but only a bit.
This layout of just doing the face is MUCH better, and organically fits the shape of the hand.
Ear Shape – If you really love elephants, you probably know and well appreciate that there are both Indian and African elephants, and they look quite different, especially in the size and shape of their ears. Indian elephants have smaller ears, and African elephants have larger ears. Which one is this? Well, that’s just the thing. It’s neither. It’s both. It’s whichever you want it to be. It’s actually somewhere in between. What it *really* is is an ear size/shape that fits the size and shape of the hand perfectly, without caring about the accuracy of the representation of any particular elephant. Also, I shaded the ears like they were petals on a flower, rather than trying to do real other shading.
Amount and Placement of “Henna-ish” Elements – So often, I try to fill the elephant with as much henna-ish stuff as possible. The key lines of the face and ears end up being of similar visual importance as, and therefore all mixed up with, the henna-ish bits, which really should just be extra decoration. We want an elephant who is wearing a bit of mehndi … not an elephant-ish thing where the line between mehndi and elephant is so blurred that two become one.
Symmetry But Not – This elephant’s head gives a strong overall impression of symmetry. But is it perfect? Of course not – the whole design was drawn freehand in about ten minutes. The thing is, it was never intended to be 100% symmetrical – doing the ears slightly differently from the get-go (check out the tops of them, especially) means that it looks good and intentional, rather than like the asymmetry is a mess-up. Did you notice until just now that even the eyes aren’t actually even trying to be the same? Probably not, because it doesn’t matter for the overall impression. But if they *were* trying to be the same, but fell short, you’d notice, and it would bug you. Also, the fact that there are “extra bits” down both the pointer and ring fingers adds to that impression of balance, without actually being symmetrical.
Those Eyes – Ridiculously long eyelashes hold a special place in my heart. Also, adding the lines for depth around the eyelids makes the elephant not feel flat, despite the fact that, of course, it is. (I learned that from studying bridal figures – thanks, Bharathi Sanghani Mehndi!) Also, even though they’re kinda messed up from a realism point of view, the two eyes being different shapes makes it unclear whether it is staring at you straight on (which gets either threatening or creepy real fast) or gazing off up and to the side (which could make it look coy, disinterested, or both). So you get to decide what the elephant’s expression is for yourself, pretty much, since it’s a few things at once.
The Trunk and Ring Foofy – This element, which I lovingly refer to as a “foofy”, in accordance with having grown up as an artist on The Henna Page forums, is key. It ties the whole design together. It makes it so that her finger is kind of another trunk, but not really. It works because the finger and trunk are pretty much the same shape. It works because this sort of finger squiggly bit is so common in henna design, and just happens to fit great in both those spots.
So… those are my thoughts on why this turned out awesome. You might think that I can take full credit for this awesomeness, as it is a photo of my henna work. You would not be correct there. For one, I learned from JessiKay Graham that placing an elephant face with the trunk down the middle finger is such a fabulous thing. For two, Snapchat taught me that the filter that puts flowers over your (or an elephant’s) face is cute, but kinda distracts from and interrupts the shape of the forehead (which can be either a good or a bad thing)… which led to me rejecting a number of very, very similar inspiration sources that I was sure would turn out terribly (and didn’t love the original images of as much). For four, this is actually fundamentally based on an image that my client brought in for me to work from. She was showing me all these complicated ones, or ones with flaws that really bugged me, and I kept saying “nope, that will come out terrible and/or cost you like $100 – try again” and she kept digging and digging literally all day, checking back in at the tent multiple times, until she finally arrived at this one from zoefrasertattoo – which I proclaimed would be okay and I could do something for less than $50 based on it with no problem.
All of that said, is this truly the perfect elephant henna design? Of course not. There’s always room for improvement. In this particular case, I realized I had spent *so* much time getting the elephant’s face right, that by the time I was doing the flowers, I felt a strong need to finish quickly. So some of those flowers are a bit iffy. But you know what? That’s really okay, too – because, as it should be, this design is all about the elephant, with the henna-inspired add-ons just there as a bonus.
And there you have it – The Story of How Heather Overthinks Henna Style Elephants For Many Years and Then Encounters a Patient and Dedicated Client on a Budget and it Works Out Kinda Cool 🙂