Pixel — Art-Toy Cartoon Corgi, Rooftop Terrace, Austin

The brief arrived as a photograph of a dog and a colour swatch. The dog was a corgi called Pixel. The swatch was the butter yellow the company had used on its first business card in 2014.

What we were asked for

A sculpture for the roof terrace of their office, roughly the height of a person, that would read both from four floors up and from the pavement below. Not a memorial and not a portrait of a real animal — a character. The one hard rule was that it had to look like it had been made on purpose, and not like a giant pet ornament.

Designing it as a toy, not as a dog

So we stopped designing a corgi and started designing a toy. The head grew until it was almost half the height of the body. The legs shortened. The body became one plump volume with no anatomy left in it at all. Once the silhouette worked as a toy, we put the corgi back in — the upright ears, the low-slung shape — and it survived the reduction. That is the test we run on every character before we build it.

The 3D file went through six rounds because of a single problem: seen from the pavement, the ears read as two separate objects floating above the head. We thickened each ear at the base and tilted them back four degrees, which joined them into one continuous silhouette.

Build and finish

Laminated in fibreglass over a steel armature, then finished to a single ultra-gloss coat — the sort of surface you find on a designer toy, not on a garden ornament. Butter yellow over the body, cobalt blue on the ears, paws and tail. The gloss was the risky part: every hollow and every bump in the form shows in it, so the sanding took longer than the painting did.

On the roof

It is bolted through the paving into the structural slab, with a crane lug on the underside so it lifts off when the building needs to work on its roof membrane. The studio has since started using the colour as a brand accent, which we are taking as the highest compliment available.