Making A Chic Elephant Statuette

I’ve been wanting for some time now to smuggle some of my son’s plastic animal toys and use them to make a craft or two, inspired by the ones I’ve seen online. Unfortunately, at the age of ten, you don’t find that  many left in a kid’s room and although I had big plans, I did not quite get the selection I was hoping for. I succeeded in obtaining only these few plastic animals that were forgotten in a toy chest.

Of all, I thought that the large elephant would make a nice little statuette for the formal living room.

I simply spray painted my little treasure with gold metallic spray paint.  Two evenly sprayed coats were just enough and adhered easily onto the toy.

To hold my precious statuette, I chose a chunky piece of dark rosewood. I found it at the woodcraft store, and it was all covered with wax (to resist to humidity on its journey from some exotic place), which I scrapped off. There were lots of pre-cut pieces like this one at different dimensions and I chose one  big enough for the size of my elephant. No need to stain it as it already had a beautiful cinnamon-brown color.

I glued the elephant using the hot glue gun because the surface of the wood was still slippery from the wax. Otherwise, a regular strong glue would had worked as well.

In less than one hour, the elephant turned from this:

To this:

Any kind of animal is suitable to make a statuette like this: You can use a rhino,  a horse, a frog or  a monkey of any size and in any position. I decided to glue the elephant diagonally onto the wood base but either way works!

This is now a chic piece of decor just perfect for the formal living room, not that it can’t go in any other room of the house, from a bathroom to a bedroom. For now, it will decorate the mantel along with the books that I covered a while ago with Kraft paper and decorated with gold leaf.  There is absolutely nothing left to remind of the old plastic toy! Even the previous owner of this elephant will be unable to recognize it!