Illustration Friday "Fail" Paper Collage

This week's Illustration Friday's theme is "Fail."

I immediately thought about stuff like getting bad marks at school, losing races (done that plenty!), letting other people down, etc.

Then my mind started to drift towards worse failure and the cruelty that is Natural Selection. African elephants have hard lives. Many don't survive the yearly trek to the wetter regions. I thought about the strange elephant burial grounds. They are areas where many African elephants who have become too weak or injured limp off to die; frequently where other elephants have died before. The ground is littered with the gigantic bones of these amazing creatures.

Mammoths are, of course, extinct. I suppose extinction is the ultimate failure.

This is a collage of paper bones on dirt. The bones are cut entirely free hand (no tracing or outlines drawn before they're cut) and there's a little trilobite in the corner for interest. Please view full for maximum detail.

Thanks for checking it out and don't forget to look at the other nifty entries!