Once the letter has been received in the North Pole head office it is cross-referenced with the 'Naughty or Nice List'. If it fills all criteria it is moved up along the chain, if not, It is sent to the reindeer who prepare some petrified poop into something that resembles coal. This will be delivered to the child at Christmas.
Letters that have been deemed worthy will go to the design department. A team of designers and Draftselves will create the blueprints for the toy. Everything is made bespoke so that during the rest of the year Santa is not sitting on a lot of inventory.
Make is so
Here is the 3rd scene I made for the Funtasia ice sculpture exhibition in 2015. For this one I wanted to show that Santa's presents are personalised and not just something you could buy from a shop. Each one is specifically designed for the child in mind because they were so good leading up to Christmas.
Making of (Montage 3)
One of the things I like most about working with ice is that you can treat it like wood and use it to construct objects which would be harder to carve.
I love working with wood but making accurate joints can be a chore. With ice, you get it near enough then with water and slush as glue, you can cover over your many mistakes. The stool and easel were a nice carpentry interlude for me.
The Elf was about 75cm tall. I wanted to get him out of one block and still leave ice for making other things. When you are working with ice you are always thinking like a game of Tetris, spare bits from here can become important bits over there. I try to keep a Blueprint in my mind of the whole project as I steal from Peter to pay Paul.
Speaking of blueprints, I thought I drew the cutting pattern to make a teddy bear but now, for the life of me, I can't work it out from my design. I knew whatever drawing I would do would melt away during the exhibition and so I used a Die Grinder with a milling bit to cut a deep line drawing in the back of the block and then fill the lines with coloured sand and water.
The last details were the feathered Quill in the elve's hand and the little bobble on his hat. It was fun to see it all come together from the sum of its parts.
How did it stand up?
40 days later when I returned I was happy with how it aged. Most of the surface detail was gone but the feather and the delicate little ball on the hat were still present. The blueprint now looked like a hologram as it hovered inside the clear ice.
The Elf had lost a few pounds and looked like he was made of water. (Strange that!)
Around the exhibition, they had added other attractions to make the entrance price more appealing. I thought the whole setup was quite nice.
So, there we have it for this evening. Now that the message has gotten to Santa and his elves they are getting straight to work on preparing the presents for Christmas morning. I'll be back with the next episode as soon as I can.
Ps
Thanks for reading. I use PeakD to document my work as an ephemeral Sculptor of sand, snow and ice, amongst other things. This will hopefully give it a new life on the Hive Blockchain. Below you will find some of my recent posts.
Santa's supply chain (Part 2) - ice sculpture
Santa's supply chain (Part 1) - ice sculpture
Corona Extra - sand sculpture
I hope you'll join me again soon
If you would like to support me
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I am also starting to create NFTs of my sculptures and welcome you to my gallery where you can own a bit of ephemeral sculpture history.
[//]:# (!pinmapple 53.705519 lat -6.364133 long Santa's supply chain (Part 3) - ice sculpture 2015 d3scr)