If you've been strolling along Singapore's Orchard Road during the X'mas of 2011, I'm pretty sure you would've encountered the Elephant Parade that was the theme of Tangs Shopping Centre. Painted elephant statues of around 1.5m length were used to decorate the entrance to Tangs, as well as the grass patches above Raffles Place MRT Station. The miniature versions of these elephants were available for sale, the proceeds of which would go to, I quote, the Asian Elephant Foundation for the cause of elephant preservation.
My wife, Chet''s favourite animal is the elephant and ever since we've been dating, her collection of elephant soft toys, statuettes, and any elephant-related memorabilia have been growing steadily. So for X'mas this year, I decided to get her a couple of these elephant parade elephants. We went to Tangs hoping to score a couple of the Simply Red elephant in 20cm size (they come in various sizes: 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 75cm but not all sizes are available for all designs), but when we were there, the only one left was a display piece. Furthermore, the customer service was pretty bad in Tangs, as all the Staff knew very little about these elephants and their stock.
So... when all else fails, search the web! Elephant Parade has their own website where they sell these elephant statuettes. We went there and, though they didn't have Simply Red in 20cm size, we bought a 10cm one to be displayed on Chet's office table. Then, while browsing through their web-shop, Dandy-phant caught our eye. We decided then to purchase one 20cm and one 15cm sized Dandy to be displayed in our house, and as Chet's X'mas present.
The delivery came on time or slightly earlier, as stated in their website that it requires an 11 working day manufacture and delivery lead time for our order. We even anticipated that they'd be late with all the flooding that was happening in Bangkok at that time. There's nothing to shout about for brown carton box that these three elephants were packed in when they were shipped. The left over spaces in the box were filled with styrofoam that littered all over our house floors as we pulled each individual boxes out. However, the individual boxes that each elephant was kept in were pretty well designed, like a box-within-a-box that pretty much protects the hand-painted elephants through their journey from Thailand.
Each elephant statuette comes with a "Certificate of Origin", stating their edition size and that particular elephant's serial number, year, and city. Let's start off with the 10cm Simply Red, shown below...
Personally I think 10cm is a pretty good size for a Simply Red, mainly because it is a monotonous bright red colour and nothing else. It might've been too bland for a larger elephant size. But for Dandy-phant, I think the paint-work on the 15cm is more refined than that of the 20cm one. As you can tell from the third photo from the back, the dandelion on the 20cm one is painted with thicker strokes than the 15cm one. This is the same for the blades of grass that lines the elephants' feet.
Below: 20cm Dandy-phant... while it is more majestic in terms of size, the thicker brush strokes renders the art work somewhat less refined than the 15cm one.
The Trio together... If you like elephants as well, I'm pretty sure having a couple of these handpainted statuettes in the house will brighten your day...
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