Last weekend was Father’s Day. My dad is somewhat hard to get anything for because he’s not into the typical “dad” stuff.

When I run across something and I think that he will like it I typically pick it up because otherwise I may never find it again.

This year I ran into that problem when I went to the local garden center. An idea came to mind, and after mulling it over for a week I decided to follow through with it.

When I was walking through this section of the garden I ran across something that I thought would be perfect.

A concrete calf!

I saw this little guy and thought that he was just the cutest thing ever. The only problem is that I have zero artistic ability. I am hard-pressed to paint a flat wall decently. How was I going to paint this up to actually look like a calf?

Like usual when I don’t know how to do something, I looked it up online. I did a lot of reading and research before I decided on a plan of action. I sealed it with a coat of latex exterior paint (the same stuff that I used on the porch and deck last year), and then waited for it to dry.

What breed should I paint it as, though? My dad isn’t a dairy farmer so I didn’t even consider Holsteins (the black and white ones that everybody knows).

(Picture is from the website Cattle.com)

Growing up my dad had a Limousin bull, Larry. This bull was not very bright and he began misbehaving so we sold him, but he was a good-looking cow. Also, I figured this one would be difficult enough to be challenging  without frustrating me enough to just give up. Otherwise, my Plan B if this one didn’t work out was just to paint it up as an Angus cow (all black).

Somehow I managed to mix up the color pretty well. It was almost the rusty brown that I wanted. The difficult part was getting the lighter color around the eyes and nose to appear natural. To me it looked like I had painted a bulls-eye… ha ha… get it? Bulls – eye….

Even though I wasn’t happy, I kept soldiering on..

And this is what I ended up with in the end. He stood around in our library for a few weeks before we took him up to my parents’. When my dad saw him he was surprised and a bit amazed. Of course, he couldn’t guess which breed he was supposed to be. Maybe if I’d hung a sign around his neck that said, “Hello, my name is Larry” he would have figured it out.

Jay was quite impressed with it. So much that he was tempted to go out and buy another calf to have me paint one for our yard. I told him that we didn’t need a calf in our yard. I might try painting another concrete statue again, but definitely not one that would require a lot of detail work. I’m definitely not THAT good!