Well, this might be old news for some of you but it was certainly news to me! It seems that in Thailand, there are places where people teach elephants to paint on canvas. The video below shows an elephant outlining an elephant. From the information I've gattered the elephant is actually drawing it from memory, probably based on an original man made drawing, still the fact that they have the ability to understand the rules of the process of painting amazes me to no end.

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I seen this on CNN a few months back where some woman had an Elephant and was selling the paintings for an absurd amount of money for the abstract paintings. Actually teaching one to draw is neat. It's always amazed me that we look over so many things in our environment, such as animals, that may be trying to teach us things for once though -- instead of us training them!

I think they also sell them to raise money for elephant awareness.

When I saw this, I thought that the elephant was going to going to sort of smear it all around.

But... that's an actual painting of something. Amazing.

I thought this thread was going to be about painting elephants, that is, using the elephants as the canvas.

I thought it was this....

http://www.elephantparadelondon.org/

I think Koko (and Michael) has this elephant beat, in that I believe the elephant is copying examples provided by the human trainers (I have a feeling that every single drawing made by that elephant will look the same) whereas Koko is actually creating.


BIRD by Koko

Quote: Koko seems to have painted her pet fledgling blue jay from memory. We rescued the bird from the nearby highway after a storm. Koko named the bird Tongue because of its protuberant tongue - the scrawny bird was always hungry and Koko enjoyed feeding it. 20 x 16 acrylic on canvas, 1983

Does anyone know if they trained the elephant to create that specific painting, or if the elephant is really painting a likeness of an elephant holding a flower? The former is impressive, but the latter would be mind blowing.

Quote: Original post by Pete Michaud
Does anyone know if they trained the elephant to create that specific painting, or if the elephant is really painting a likeness of an elephant holding a flower? The former is impressive, but the latter would be mind blowing.

I believe that in the case of well defined images, they were trained based on man made originals. They can also paint original abstract paintings as the ape above.
In the report I linked they say that there are tendences on the preference of colors according to the zone the elephants live.

To me. the fact that they will paint only inside the area of the canvas and not also everywhere else is mind blowing by itself.

I don't know if anyone else noticed, or if it's relevant, but (s)he painted over the curves that was too pale.
So it seems (s)he didn't copied the movements, but the picture instead. And that's something.

Apart from that: they have beaten so many elephants so many times, until one made it right :P