Doodle — Crayon-Drawing Cartoon Dog, Schoolyard, Denmark

The design for this sculpture was already finished when we were called. It was a crayon drawing on A4 paper, made by a seven-year-old, of the school dog.

The decision we had to defend

The easy version of this job is to take the drawing as reference and build a clean, well-proportioned cartoon dog from it. We argued for the harder version: build the drawing itself, at 1.7 m, wobble and all. The school agreed, on the condition that it still be safe to climb, and that it still had to look like a dog from the other side of the yard.

Turning a drawing into a form

We traced the original drawing into the 3D model as a construction guide rather than as a texture. The outline of the drawing became the actual silhouette of the sculpture — which is why one ear is noticeably bigger than the other, and why the left foreleg is thicker than the right. Those are not modelled errors. They are in the drawing.

The colour fill was the difficult part. A child’s crayon stops short of the outline in places and presses harder in others, leaving the paper visible through the wax. We reproduced that with a deliberately uneven paint lay-down over a warm-white ground, keeping the margin at the edge.

Build, edges and safety

Fibreglass over a steel core, satin clear coat so the wax texture reads without glare. Every edge was radiused to a minimum of 8 mm, the tail was thickened beyond what the drawing asked for, and the plinth was given a 300 mm apron of soft playground surfacing. It is climbed on constantly.

After a year

The wobbles have turned out to be the point. Children who would not look twice at a correct dog sculpture will stand and point at the wonky ear, because they have drawn that ear themselves. It has become a landmark for the school in a way a well-proportioned statue would not have been.