Painting Elephants

Perhaps my favorite subject is an elephant.  The majority of my pencil drawings are made up of elephants.  I love the texture and extreme detail of the wrinkles and lines in the skin.  When I began to paint, it was simply for the sake of using color.  My first works were abstracts.  Then enough people told me they loved the use of color, but they would prefer to see something in the abstract.  So I began to use the elephant as my subject once again, only this time I combined color and the different textures you can create, either visually or physically with paint.  How abstract the painting is, or how much of the bright colors I use, or how large or small the canvas is that I use all contribute to the feel or character of the piece.