Snow White - ice/ snow sculpture

Europa- Park is Europe's biggest theme park, yes even bigger than Euro Disney. It straddles the town of Rust In Germany which in some ways has ceased to be a town but a collection of Holiday homes and hotels using the Park as its lifeblood.
I was asked at the last minute to go and create a sculpture for the 2017 Magic Ice sculpture exhibition when one of the booked carvers had to cancel. I was very happy with the work due to a lack of the green stuff.
The park itself is divided into many areas built around the theme of many countries and the sculpture was to be built in a bull ring in the middle of the Spanish town. A large freezer structure was built keeping the temperature at a balmy -14 Centipede.

The sculpture I was asked to do wasn't too artistic or creative. Dutch Carver Kilian Van Der Velden and I were just asked to make a room and some characters based on the story of Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs. I left Killian to do the characters while I concentrated on the room and furnishings.

As is usual for such a project the stack of snow and Ice given to me was in a way which needed some major rejigging to put it in a shape which I could do something with. So, for the first two days, Kilian and I played a game of Tetris as we cut and shifted heavy blocks of snow around.

Finally, we had a stack that made sense for some sort of internal structures. With only 6 days left, I had to do most of my carving with chainsaws and big chisels to whip it into shape. I'm still surprised at how fast I can work when I have to. I did one quick pass trying to get all the main forms in, getting rid of the scaffold as soon as I could to make it easier to work everything as one and distribute my time all over the wall.

The central section with all the ice was something I wasn't sure how to deal with, as it made no sense with everything else opaque. Hidden in the walls left and right there were big ice blocks which I revealed and made into windows. For the center, I thought it was best to treat it in the same way so I added snow blocks as a skin and carved it back to match the rest. It was a pain in the arse and a big waste of precious ice but It had to be done.

All that there was then to do on the last two days was to make a Table and chairs and add all the texture details and fun elements until I ran out of time. At this point, I was joined by Dutch carvers Wilfred Stijger (soon to join Steemit) and Jeroen Van der Vlag to help finish everything.

It's time to talk about the elephant in the room

Due to the fact this project was for Europa-park, they wanted to have Mascot elements from the Park shoved into the overall exhibition. These made no sense to the sculpture we were trying to make but we just had to grin and bear it. Ludo Roders, also from Holland did a beautiful job of carving this cartoony elephant and sponsor Logo but I thought it best to frame it out of my photos. She also made the little birdies at the table, which brought a bit of life to the area.

Kilian did a great job of the other characters and we were able to disguise Otto Waalkes,( another Mascot of the park) in Plainsight as a dwarf. On the outside of the windows, Killian also made some quick silhouettes of other Dwarfs leaving the building. Those with eagle eyes may also notice the Steemit logo which I added near the rafters as a quick little detail, just for the fun of it.

Snow and Ice can be very difficult to photograph because of their overall whiteness and see-throughness quality but luckily I took my finished pictures in Raw so I could use the magic of Photoshop to bring out the texture detail and play around with the colours.

A really fun project overall but way too little time to make something too creative. The floor was covered with a nice clean layer of snow dust to even it up after we finished but as with most snow projects, I am long gone when the finishing touches and lights are added. Hopefully, I will get to go again next year and maybe do something a little more artistic.

I used Steepshot to post a progress report each day of the project to Steemit and will do this again next week while I am making a nativity from sand in Catalonia.

Ps

Thanks for joining me. All comments are welcome good or bad. Let me know what you think about the sculpture and my blog posts in general as it helps me know how to format them. For now, you can check out some of my other posts below.