The Chained Elephant
A story about a rope that could be broken but never is — drawn in pencil, so the weight of the chain is something you can see in the grain.
The Chained ElephantThe brief
Bucay's fable is short and carries one idea: the elephant stays put because, once, it couldn't leave. The illustration had to carry the whole book — the cover, the spreads, and the thumbnail it would be seen at first.
The move
Everything is pencil on paper, drawn freehand, with a single orange as the only colour in the book. The chain does the narrating: it crosses the cover, cuts the spread in two, and is the one element whose weight never changes.
The detail
The elephant was drawn from the skin down — the ear, the eye, the folds behind the trunk — because a fable about restraint only works if the animal is real enough to feel sorry for.
- Storyboarded page by page before final art
- Freehand graphite drawings on paper, scanned at size
- One spot colour across cover and interior
- Cover and interior laid out as a landscape book