Globe - ice sculpture

I don't have much to say about this piece, it was a one day carve from a small block of ice for the 2007 Jelgava, Latvia ice sculpture competition. The second piece I made over there along with Alan Magee will come next and I have more to say about that one but before that post I have to really get this one out of the way and continue documenting my work, warts and all in a chronological order. (Anal retentive or what?)

For me it wasn't a very beautiful piece though the concept had some promise. My ideas was to put a sculpture inside a sculpture. I made a little model of planet earth and then wanted to create a shell around it like an atmosphere of clouds etc to make a multi-layer kind of holographic sculpture. All that sounds kind of interesting in theory but in practice, not so much.

Making a balls of it

Carving the earth was straight forward enough. I have a technique I invented to make a ball with a ruler and a piece of string. I'll show you that sometime. Remind me!
To make the atmosphere I used the ice I a had left to make two hemispheres which would go together at the equator and these were hollowed out and then textured on the inside to give it a cloud like structure.

And that's where it all went wrong

With a mixture of condensation build up on the inside when I put the whole thing together and my overuse of cloud texture made the whole idea not work too great. I was running out of time and wanted to try and salvage it so carved opening that gave the appearance of water drops coming together where the hemispheres join but there was no making this pigs ear into a silk purse.

Lessons learned

The idea did work some how but not in photos and deserves further experimentation. Things I will have to watch out for are keeping things simple in the design and not going overboard on textures. Why the ice fogged up with condensation I still don't know but making sure there is a vent for the air is important I did learn that much.
As I said I don't have much more to say about it and so I'll finish here. My next post will hopefully be more interesting.

Here's how it looked at night with some wacky lighting.

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Ps

Thanks for reading. I use Steem to document my work as an ephemeral Sculptor of sand, snow and ice, among other things. This will hopefully give it a new life on the Steem blockchain. Below you will find some of my recent posts.

Elephant slide - ice sculpture

Antarctic ocean - ice sculpture

A modern nativity - sand sculpture

I hope you'll join me again soon
@ammonite
[//]:# (!steemitworldmap 56.652721 lat 23.725336 long Glode - ice sculpture 2007 d3scr)