Tag Archives: Cow

A LEGO Boxcar built for Bessie

While normally a red caboose would mark the end of the train, Mike Sinclair is back at the L-gauge, this time with a glorious cattle car. Working with a single color, Mike lets the bricks’ native texture do the work of breaking up the creation. Perfectly positioned tiles mimic the wooden slats on the side of the car, with black trim providing the hardware. And the scene around this heifer hauler is just as spectacular as the main subject. Track ballast dappled with light gray 1×1 round plates and a perfectly-crafted stopblock set the scene admirably.

Cattle Car

That’s a lot of bull

2021 is the Year of the Ox, and to help us celebrate, LEGO builders are constructing a breadth of bricky bovines. Pistash challenged himself to use only pearl gold elements, and the result is this mechanical bull that’s actually not very brickish at all. With a mess of bars and ornamentation pieces surrounding a core frame of fence gates, this golden calf is one of the odder creations I’ve seen recently, and I am loving every bit of it.

2021 year of Ox and metal

Check out other LEGO Year of the Ox creations in our archives.

Mooove over, Year of the Rat

As the Year of the Ox is approaching next week, Ian Hou (AKA DOGOD Brick Design) blesses us with a new LEGO creation. He wishes us a happy, healthy new year and tells us to be as strong as an ox. And thinking about the positives of having gotten through this past year, let’s look into Ian’s brick cow. All throughout you’ll find excellent part usages and slope shaping. The legs are formed by angled wedge plates and the hooves with 2×2 corner wedges. Ian also uses a 6×6 train roof for the cow’s thigh and a half arch for the subtle shaping of the cow’s neck.

nEO_IMG_2021_Be strong as an Ox(正)_1

Read on to see the close up details

This cow doesn’t fear the reaper, nor do the wind, the sun, or the rain

It’s a tribute to the enduring power of certain images that I cannot hear the word “cowbell” without thinking of Blue Öyster Cult and fevers. And the LEGO minifgure torso looks remarkably like a cowbell, if one ignores the holes where the arms should go; so when I faced the challenge of coming up with creative uses for the part, I just had to build a cow with a cowbell around her neck. The whole time I was building it, I had to resist the idea of scrapping the build and trying to craft a hairy Will Ferrell holding the cowbell instead, and “The Reaper” was playing on repeat in my head. Ever try to build LEGO while dancing around playing air cowbell? It ain’t easy. I snuck in another torso in the barn, and added some of my dad’s old bushes and trees around it for some microscale detail in the background. LEGO is truly a multi-generational toy!

I've got a fever

While you’re feeling rustic, here are some more LEGO builds of barns and LEGO farms. And don’t forget to check out the Iron Forge, and even get a few entries in yourself!

A Saucerful of Secrets

Mysteries abound in this latest creation by Blake Foster. Turning the Tables features a classic UFO scenario turned on its head. Have the cows had enough? Or is this actually a flashback to how the hostilities between the alien and bovine races began? Either way, there’s a lot to unpack in this vignette. On the building front, check out the clever use of on-the-sprue Harry Potter wands in the fence, the cupcake-tipped under-udder-thrusters, and the perfect use of those 1×1 star plates. The Mixel eyes on the cow-pilot just creep me out, though.

Turning the Tables

We’ve featured a number of Blake’s other Spacy Creations in the past. Could this be the beginning of a new theme of “Cow-Space”? One can only hope.