In the photo, her neck forms the trunk, and teased hair makes up the ears. Shelby Meyerhoff had turned herself into an elephant through hours of painting, posing, and photographing.

An artist based outside Boston, Meyerhoff, 44, created the portrait as a part of her Zoomorphics series, a collection of photographs in which she turns herself into wild creatures and settings. She makes the art to share her awe of wildlife, while also pointing out its precarity.

Although Meyerhoff has been a storyteller and artist to varying degrees her whole life, the kernels for the project started after she moved to Winchester, Mass., in 2014 to be closer to the Middlesex Fells Reservation. The public recreation area covers more than 2,200 acres in the Massachusetts communities of Malden, Medford, Melrose, Stoneham, and Winchester.

Professionally, Meyerhoff had worked in communications for the Unitarian Universalist Association and the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF), where she learned about and got involved in environmental efforts, but she was looking to make art a more central part of her life.

“There were times where I didn’t have much time at all for artmaking, but it was something that as I moved into my mid-30s, I realized how much I missed it and how important it was to me,” she said.

With her environmental background and spending more time outside, the art she made had “an intellectual interest in what’s happening environmentally and a heart interest.”

Specifically, Meyerhoff started thinking about “all of the justice ramifications of our environmental crisis, but also a real sense of calling to actually be in nature and to be present with what remains,” she said.

Meyerhoff got involved with the Friends of the Fells, an organization that promotes conservation at the Middlesex Fells, and volunteered to be a face-painter at one of their events in 2016, the same year she left CLF and started transitioning to making art full-time.

“It’s funny how life has that serendipity sometimes,” she said.

“I was getting ready for the event, and I thought, well, ‘I better really practice,’” she recalled, so she bought a face-painting kit and started trying things out on her own face, drawing her inspiration from the natural world. “Then I just got so into it.”

Meyerhoff had experience with watercolors, but face paint was a whole new medium, “really very different than what I remember thinking of face and body paint as a child in the ’80s,” she said.

She’d thought of the green face paint of Halloween costumes of her past. “This is not that,” Meyerhoff said, laughing. “They really are art supplies, and they really can be used in really wondrous ways.”

At first, she would spend a few hours designing and creating a painting on her face, and she’d grab her phone to take a photo. She soon realized there could be a fine art aspect to the work.

As she nurtured the project, she noticed she spent more and more time taking photos, in part because she had to try to become the animal or plant to get the full effect.

“The difference between the right piece and the not-quite-right shot can be extremely subtle in terms of something about the expression,” she said.

Many of the animals are creatures she encounters in New England, like the mallard duck, which she said was one of the quicker portraits she’s put together.

But other wildlife is more challenging and foreign, like the portrait she created of an octopus. The blue-green cephalopod took five or six hours, she said, and she painted it while she was five months pregnant.

“The cherry blossom, the mallard duck. These are things I see in my own local ecosystems that I have a chance to sort of look at every day and appreciate,” she said. “My contact with a flamingo is very minimal, obviously.”

Meyerhoff has shown her work throughout New England, including in Providence, and will be featured on Rhode Island PBS later this fall. Whether in the work or her teaching, she always tries to remind people of the creatures she’s inhabiting and the precarious situation they often find themselves in because of human-caused climate change and other issues.

“I think the grief and the tension, and the wonder and the beauty [are] in the work,” she said.

“It’s evocative of the full picture of the moment we’re living in, which is a time of extraordinary peril for our planet and living things — and also, to a significant degree, for our own species,” she said. “I appreciate that art can be a place to hold all of that and open up that conversation.”