Yesterday, whilst coping with a visit from my ageing, and now rather pathetic, parents (which is all very sad, and rather hard to cope with, but I won't go into it now), the postman dropped a packet through my letterbox.
I had neither the time nor the inclination to even open it until late last night. When I finally did open it, it cheered me up immensely. It was from Keith at Aventine Miniatures, and contained a pair of their new Sassanid elephants. I find myself wishing, most fervently, that the WAB army lists for Sassanids allowed more than the measly one elephant per 1,000 points - or, indeed, that one could justify a sizeable number: these are beautiful models.
Anatomy-wise, these are probably the nicest ellies anyone has yet made in 28mm - there is almost nothing 'odd' about them - they look much more like elephants than the average 'wargames jumbo' (there is one tiny error, but you'd have to be a real 'elephant geek' to spot it... I suppose that makes me an elephant geek!). Detail is good - most areas have a suitably wrinkled appearance, and the 'tack' - ropes, saddle-cloth, etc, are well sculpted - with one tiny exception - the 'rope' under the tail on ELS3 does not quite meet across the join between the two halves. It won't take long to fix with green-stuff if it bothers you. That is almost the only slight problem I've spotted with the models.
The crew figures look big and bulky at first glance - but putting a ruler on them shows that they vary between 27.5 and 28.5mm from sole of foot to eyeball. The figures are nicely sculpted - the poses look realistic, the detail is good, and they'll doubtless paint up well. The elephants are nicely in scale with them - if we assume the crew figures to be somewhat less than 6' tall, the elephants are roughly 10' at the shoulder - just about average for a full-grown Indian elephant.