Elephant Parade

The Elephant Parade has arrived in Singapore and all over town, one can see many colourful and unique elephants designed by well-known artists and designers from all over the world. For those who do not know, the Elephant Parade was founded by father and son Marc and Mike Spits in 2006. A year later, the first parade was held in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Marc was inspired to create the Elephant Parade after meeting Soraida Salwala whilst on holiday in Thailand. Soraida is the founder of the first elephant hospital in the world. Here, Marc met a baby elephant named Mosha, that had lost her leg after stepping on a landmine. Realising that Soraida and her hospital were in desperate need of funds, Marc, together with his son, founded the Elephant Parade to help raise money. On June 9th 2008, baby elephant Mosha was the first elephant to receive a prosthetic leg, which was co-financed by the Elephant Parade. The elephants that are now on display in town will soon be auctioned and sold. The proceeds from the auction will then go towards conservation efforts to save the Asian elephants. I have no money nor space to house these specially designed elephants. To play a part in this meaningful program, I purchased a DIY elephant kit. And also because I thought it would be fun to paint my own elephant.

Inside the box: It came with an elephant, 6 bottles of acrylic paint and paint brushes.

According to the instruction booklet, we are supposed to paint an initial layer of white over the entire elephant so as to ensure better colour later on. I thought painting the elephant would be easy peasy especially I already had in mind the design I wanted. I was wrong. It was rather difficult for the paint to be properly coated on the clay/ceramic elephant. What I thought would take a day took longer than it did.

After the first coat of white paint was done, I started my design/painting proper. Because the toolkit came with primary colour paint, I had to do my own mixing to get other colours like pink, in this case.

Once I am done with the pink, it's time to dress the elephant up in my favourite colour, blue. Do you have an inkling what the elephant is gonna be?

For those of you who grew up in Singapore in the 80s and 90s, this should be familiar to you. Yes, it's Sharity Elephant. Sharity is the pink elephant that teaches children the importance of caring and sharing. It's sad that the government has stopped this caring and sharing campaign and children in Singapore today no longer recognizes Sharity. So, to revive my childhood memories, I decided to paint Sharity and anyway, caring (for Asian elephants) and sharing (our monetary contributions) is what the Elephant Parade is all about, isn't it??

This isn't the final product as yet. I intend to spray a layer of lacquer over the elephant to give it a nice gloss and to paste crystals over the red heart on the back of the elephant to give it some bling. After which, it shall sit nicely on my bookshelves as a bookend. Painting the elephant ain't easy, but the process was fun and it is a meaningful cause.