Tally — Stencil Cartoon Horse, Street-Art Quarter, London

The building is a former stable block on a Shoreditch corner, and the landlord wanted a horse. He also wanted it to survive being painted on, which is a different and more interesting problem.

Designing something that expects to be vandalised

A finely finished sculpture on a street corner in that neighbourhood is asking for trouble. Our view was that the piece should be designed in the visual language that was going to be applied to it anyway.

So Tally is a stencil. Flat black and off-white, hard stencil edges, a halo of spray where the stencil lifted, a few deliberate drips, and exactly one red accent on the horse’s browband. There is no lettering anywhere on it, which was a condition: a horse that appears to be advertising something is a horse nobody likes.

Why a draft horse

Stencil works with mass, not with elegance. The heavier and blockier the silhouette, the better the treatment reads from across a road. A draft horse gives us a thick neck, a big barrel and feathered legs, and we exaggerated all three.

The eyes are the only soft element on the whole piece. Everything else has a hard edge, so two simple stencil-cut eye shapes read almost photographically by contrast, which is the effect the whole piece is organised around.

Making drips on purpose

Genuine drips are impossible to fake convincingly in paint, because real ones have a thickness at the bottom. Each of the eleven drips was modelled into the surface as a small raised teardrop, then painted, so the light catches them the way it catches a real run of wet paint.

Two years on the corner

It has been tagged twice. Both times the writers worked on the black side and both times they left the eye alone, which the landlord reads as professional respect. The tags were cleaned off with solvent; the original finish underneath was undamaged, because the clear coat is doing exactly what we designed it to do.