Some of the most asked questions

How did you do that? How long does it take? How do you make it stay? And … where do you come up with the ideas?

These are some of the most commonly asked questions that we get when people look at the sculptures. I usually point at Theressa and say, “She’s the team captain and the artist. She usually has the idea.”

However, it’s not that simple a process. When deciding on a sculpture idea we have to consider the following:

1. Is there a theme?
2. What size of block? Is it like Edmonton’s 4ft by 4ft by 8ft or Winnipeg’s 12ft by 12ft by 10ft tall? And there are a number of sizes in between that we must conform to.
3. How much time do we have?
4. Can we build up or out?
5. Can we add ice features? (Whitehorse has no rules, but many others are “snow only”)
6. How many team members are going?

We usually plan for cold weather, but with some of the events we apply to attend, we have to apply months ahead of time and there is no guarantee what the weather will be like.

When we finally answer some of our questions Theressa and I usually discuss the sculpture at great length. Ideas, examples and sketches are submitted and discounted until we come up with something that we think we can do. If we have time, and any team mates that might be going with us are available, we will sometimes bounce ideas off of them.

Then, Theressa usually sketches out the sculpture from a couple of angles. She then sits down and sculpts a maquette, made from plastecine or clay, which is made to scale. Once this is done, we take photos of the piece so that we can add some grid lines to it and we are ready to carve.