I was asked to make a sculpture of a particular dog for a client. Patch is a fox terrier who should have flopped over ears but hers decided to ping up. It gives her a charm all of her own but meant it was actually a rather tricky sculpture to get right as the ears seemed very large. As the client had commissioned it as a surprise joint birthday present for friends it was impossible for me to meet Patch in person so I had to rely on photographs and looking at her conventionally eared daughter Pickle who belongs to my client.

The sculpture actually took a long time as I got bogged down in the detail and had to slim down the face to capture the distinctive muzzle of the breed. One ear is based around a small builder’s trowel and the other has part of a rotavater blade among other things. I managed to allude to the splodge on her body, hence the name Patch, by using cogs from egg whisks. The characteristic stance and feeling of her being ‘ready for anything’ worked well and is typical terrier. Some may say that my attention to detail went a little too far as I could not resist putting the strategically placed nut at the base of the tail.