O the Rising of the Sun…

…And the running of the… Centaur?!?

Official LEGO doesn’t give you a centaur body element. It’d be one of my foremost “element wish list” pieces, actually, but aside from a couple of third-party custom mouldings (by BrickArms, I think) there isn’t one yet.

There are a few ways to build a minifig-scale centaur, ranging from the simple to the ornate, and two of my kids just built their own. My 6-year-old son had a go at Chiron from the Percy Jackson series (he’s seen the films but I’ve yet to read him the books), and my 10-year-old daughter put together Firenze from the Harry Potter universe.

I got inspired to make my own, but I didn’t want to muscle in on their minifig-scale building with my AFOL skills. It’d feel like showing them up, and I try not to intimidate them out of building with LEGO. But you don’t see that many larger centaur builds.

Ok, now the centaur’s running

If I built CCBS, my first instinct for a custom build would be to try for a centaur, but CCBS is a separate universe as far as I’m concerned. I never caught any of the reputedly impressive Bionicle storyline to get into it that way, and the endless variations on the human figure always struck me as a little yawnsome, hence if I did build CCBS I’d want to try for something a little out-of-the-box.  The Star Wars buildable figures are a little more accessible, but mostly I just don’t groove that much to that scale of figure.

The other option for building a large figure is bricks, of course. This is my building comfort zone; no Technic differential wormgears or mysterious buildable figure innards, actual brick elements. Still, could I really pull off a centaur?

I thought so.

I had an idea of how to do the legs, and that worked out quite well so I progressed to the horse body. A horse body’s not that difficult when all’s said and done, but I wasn’t initially sure how to best do the tail, so I held off on that.

The big challenge with a centaur, of course, is building the human upper parts without creating a scale discrepancy, ending up feeling obliged to use the cartoony printed 1×1 round tiles for eyes, or ending up with an unnecessarily lumpy Brickheads sort of a version.

I’m rather pleased with what I eventually did. Thanks to the fact that I now possess at least two 1×2 balljoint elements with the ball in line with the long axis, I was able to put together a 3-brick-wide waist and work up from there in what turned out to be very reasonable proportion. The head seems surprisingly expressive for so few features; I thought about trying to give him a bushy black beard, but in the end it worked so well with him clean-shaven that I forgot about it until I was writing.

The tail could be a little more slender up next to the join with the body, but the sweeping look of it, based on my gladiator’s kilt, works well enough that I don’t want to mess with it in case I screw it up and can’t remember what I did the first time.

Likewise, the minifigure hands used as fingers would be better in tan, but I only have access to two tan minifig hands right now (from the Tusken Raider in 75173), so I went with all light flesh for consistency.

Not very seasonal, perhaps, but my seasonal inspiration is erratic. And declaring it the month of Decentaur is a pun too far.