The ASCII-arts provided with the cowsay distribution are, beyond doubt, absolutely marvelous. But sooner or later a tiny but unmistakable voice in your head will speak up and urge you to to get your fingers dirty with a masterpiece of your own.
Now, everybody (that matters) is a big futurama fan. That's why my very own ASCII foray resulted in the following 981 bytes of perfection:
hypno.cow

$the_cow =<<"EOC"
  $thoughts
     ___        _--_
    /    -    /     \\
   ( $eyes   \\  (    $eyes )
   |  $eyes _;\\-/|  $eyes _|
    \\___/######\\___/\\
      /##############\\
     /  ######   ##  #|
    /  ##@##@##       |
   /    ######     ##  \\
 <______-------___\\  . //_
    |       ____  | | //# \\__~__
     \\      $tongue    \\  //###  \\   \\
      |             /\'  ##  ##  ##\\   __--~--_
       \\_________- /\\ )    ^     ##|--########\\
  /--~-_\\________/_  |          #@##|#######Y##|
 | \\ `  /|       /O/ ( ###  \')    ##/######/###/
 \\  \\  | |       --  |  ###        /LLLLL--###/
  \\_ \\/  |            \\_   \\    ) /####_____--
 ___ /    \\           /     |   _-####\\
(___/     -\\_________/     / -- |#####@@@@@@\'_
 (__\\_      __,) (.___     ,/    /#####      `@@
      | -\\\\-          //-//      @@  @@@@@.
      | | \\\\_       _// //      @\'       \'@@.
      (.)   \\_)    / / //                   @@@
                  (_) (_\'
EOC
maybe a few comments (after all I call this a tutorial)
  • Some characters like \ or ' have a special meaning and need to be escaped. Write \\ and \' instead.
  • Replace the two characters which shall become the eyes by "$eyes". This will make the -e option of cowsay work.
  • The same with the tongue ($tongue)
Save your art int some file with a ".cow" ending. Move it into a place where cowsay can find it (maybe /usr/share/cowsay), or set the COWPATH environment variable appropriately.

Nobody will dispute the awesomeness of an ASCII hypno toad, but that's just the warm up. Check this out:

#!/bin/bash while ((1))
do
  for eyes in {'-~','-\','~|','\|','\/','/~','~-'}
  do
    clear
    cowsay -f hypno -e $eyes Everybody loves hypnotoad!
    sleep .05
  done
done

Y I E E H A A !!
And thanks to Matze for the idea.

Animated ascii hypno-toad generated by cowsay and bash

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