My mental image of elephants is forever changed.  No clean grey wrinkled skin here-  rather layers of color from the earth.  The elephants we saw were always rolling in mud, tossing dirt, or swatting with vegetation- and they had a thick crust of earth tones crackling all over their bodies.  My paintings are usually smooth because I use thin layers of paint, but for these images I wanted to find a different way to show the texture and color that you see on elephants in the plains.