Thinking Thursdays: Meet Trunky, the blue elephant

We were so heartened by our success with making Mr Croc that Junior J asked to make "Trunky" next (that's the elephant hero in "The Enormous Crocodile").  It took quite awhile for this fellow to come together.  Firstly, I wanted the elephant to match in size with Mr Croc (so that he can pass as having enough strength to fling the croc to the sun to be "sizzled up like a sausage", yes, I'm anal like that), so I thought it'd be best to go with another toilet roll as the body base.  Then elephants tend to be rather rounded in many aspects, and have all sorts of fiddly bits like a trunk and tusks, which I had to figure out.  And to top it off, I had absolutely no idea what materials I could use to make those stumpy legs!

In the end, after agonizing over it for a few days, I went with hosepipe for the legs, and this "skeleton" came together:

I did the base without the boy since it was alot of trial and error!
The body consists of a toilet paper roll, and the legs, hosepipe.
Then to give Trunky a more rounded look, he got two wads of paper stuffed into both
ends of the body.  The head was made from another scrunched up paper ball,
and the trunk was a rolled up strip of used paper.
Everything was held down using tape (again, use masking tape so its easy to paint over!)

The boy then got some PVA glue (white craft glue) and an ice-cream stick, and got down to smearing glue on the legs and on strips of paper:

We basically more or less "bandaged" the fellow up in pieces of paper and tape (I thought it would have been cleaner than trying to do paper mache with all those soggy strips of stuff), so Trunky ended up like this (we taped down flaps of paper as ears too):

Then Junior J got his paint and paint brush and got down to painting the elephant.  I went off to warm up his milk for supper, and came back to find him doing this instead:  

He had gotten impatient with using the paintbrush, and had started smearing paint on his hands, and then rubbing them on the elephant!  It seemed to be more effective though, so I left him at it, and we only stoppped when the boy got really dirty (it was bedtime anyway).  There were still alot of wrinkly bits of paper (thanks to the scrunched out paper balls) which were hard to paint, so I ended up covering those parts with tape and touching up those areas with paint.  Oh, and we also added a tail, which was just pieces of twine braided together.  The boy painted that as well:

Then Trunky was left for blind to dry overnight, and we gave him eyes and tusks (again, just scraps of drawing block rolled up and glued on) the next morning:

So now we have an elephant to protect all the little kids from the ravenous appetite of the Enormous Crocodile.  And if you are wondering why he's blue instead of the usual boring grey, well, the boy insisted that Trunky be painted "blue like Sidney" (another elephant, but from another book).  I'm wondering what animal he'll ask for next.  Hopefully, its not something complicated like an armadillo!