Yes, I know that I’m posting this after Easter. If I wait until next year, I’ll get busy and it will never happen. Much better to do it now while I can find all the pics and remember how I sculpted it.
Easter egg bunny ice sculpture
My egg bunny ice sculpture design is brand new to ice sculpting secrets and I’ve never seen anyone sculpt anything like it in ice. However, I once saw a wood cutout of an Easter bunny that was kinda similar. I’m about 90% sure that I took a picture of it too, but I can’t find the pic, so far. I want to say I saw it at a Michael’s store, but without finding the pic, I couldn’t even say that. At any rate, inspired by that probable photo and wood cutout, I came up with this egg bunny ice sculpture design.
If I ever find do the pic of the cutout that inspired this design, I’ll be very surprised if my design is a close match. My memory is not that good, lol. I decided that my design needed a basket and to say “Happy Easter!” I don’t know if the cutout had either of those elements.Β
I'm experimenting with engraving inside the ice
Obviously, I designed my egg bunny ice sculpture to be an Easter brunch piece. So I want it to last a while in case brunch is pretty long. With sculpture longevity in mind, I’ve lately been trying out various ways of putting all the detail in the center of the ice, so that it will last as long as possible. I’ve also tried this with other holiday pieces and it’s worked well, at least from a durability point of view.
Let me be clear though, you DON’T have to freeze the details inside the ice if you’d like to make my egg bunny ice sculpture! I’m just using this design to discuss a fairly advanced ice sculpting technique. If that’s not what you’re looking for or just effing boring to you π€ͺ then skip down below.
you need flat surfaces to freeze your engraving inside the block
The basic approach for putting detail inside of an ice sculpture is to engrave the detail on a slab of ice in reverse. And then you freeze another slab over that, encasing the detail in an ice “sandwich.” The sculpture is then displayed so that the engraving is viewed reading in the proper direction.
When you cut slabs of ice, making the cut surfaces flat is tough. The best way to do it is with a bandsaw. And that would be great, except I don’t have one of those. I use an Alaskan mill. An Alaskan mill is an attachment for a larger chainsaw that adds a somewhat cumbersome adjustable guide. The guide forces the chainsaw to cut at a uniform (mostly) thickness.
Alaskan mills work pretty well and they don’t take up much space, compared to a bandsaw. Unfortunately, they almost never cut perfectly flat slabs.
I’m going to go into this more later in a post about Alaskan mills, but slabs cut with an Alaskan mill often have a bit of a curve. That’s because your cut is guided by the mostly flat, but still imperfect outer surface of your ice block. Check out the diagram below for a likely better explanation of what I mean.
here’s a trick you can use to match surfaces with an Alaskan mill. We already know that mill cuts are often slightly curved. So if you try to freeze a curved surface to a curved surface, they rarely match and you can end up with big gaps. However, if you keep track of your cut slabs and the cut surfaces, you can match a curve to a curve!
use the CNC to flatten surfaces
Ok, so I don’t have a bandsaw and Alaskan mills don’t consistently create perfectly flat surfaces. What do I do? π€·ββοΈ
Well, the most expensive tool in my arsenal is actually pretty good at making flat surfaces. All I have to do is add a flattening run to my CNC programming. Since I only cut a thin layer off the top of my ice, usually about .15″, my CNC isn’t working very hard. So I can boost the feed rate a lot to speed things up. Even using my largest bit, a 1/2″ end mill, it still adds a fair amount of time, but the results are worth it.
here’s one of my egg bunny ice sculptures in progress. Most of the hard stuff is done here. You can’t really see it, but in addition to engraving all of the detail, this ice piece has also been flattened. I’ll add the color details with sand and then freeze another flattened ice slab on top to create a long-lasting ice sandwich where the details are not on the surface of the ice sculpture.
here’s that egg bunny ice sculpture from before, now almost finished and hanging out with his hatching chick buddy. The egg bunny is turned around so that “Happy Easter!” reads properly.
you don't have to freeze the slabs completely together
If you try to freeze two large slabs of ice together, it’s very difficult to get them to freeze together perfectly, with no spots where the water didn’t get to as it froze. It’s possible I suppose, but I rarely get close, since in my freezer, the water starts to freeze the instant it touches the ice. Some pockets here and there inevitably get closed off and become inaccessible.
Ironically, I’d likely have better success if I tried this sort of freeze outside my freezer. That’s because the freezing is slower (and thus ends up a bit clearer) and there’s more free-flowing water available to fill the gaps. But in my set up, moving my ice outside the freezer to work on it creates an additional set of new problems.
So, in order to get a better looking freeze and still stay in the freezer, I decided on a different approach. Louis Manzoni of Art in Ice, doesn’t know this, but he taught me this technique. Well, he gave me the idea.
You can see in the design template down below that the cover slab has a edge around the entire cut piece. That’s because the center is inset slightly, perhaps .15″ or .2″. So when I put the slabs together, only the outer edge of the cover slab is touching the main ice slab. Then when I freeze them together, I’m only trying to freeze the outside edges together. That’s a LOT easier than trying to freeze the the whole slabs together. And it’s a lot cleaner look too! You’ll see me doing that a lot more now that I figured that out.
finally, the design!
Sorry, I tend to go off on tangents with these secrets blog posts. Ideally, I’m explaining useful techniques or relating funny experiences. But sometimes it’s just a lot of words. Anyway, here’s what you wanted when you clicked on this post, the design!
here’s the design for my egg bunny ice sculpture. You can choose whatever colors float your boat. I generally look for the most pastel-looking color sands that I have at the time. Hard to go wrong with pink and blue for Easter!
you don’t have to make your egg bunny ice sculpture with the sandwich technique like I did. But these are the parts that I’d recommend if you do. (Except you also need a base piece, which isn’t shown.) The main slab is 2.5″ thick and I use a 2″ thick cover slab (the one on the right). After subtracting flattening runs of .15″ on the weld surfaces of both sides, your resulting sculpture ends up just about 4 1/4″ thick. Also, make sure you read above why the cover slab has a border/inset.
cutting the egg bunny on my CNC vs. by hand
I specifically designed my egg bunny ice sculpture to be CNC’d. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t make this sculpture by hand.
If I was sculpting this piece by hand, I would almost certainly skip trying to freeze the details inside the ice. That’s very possible by hand, but it’s also very time consuming and the results can be uneven. It’s hard enough to do with a CNC; adding the extra difficulty of doing it by hand would be bit much for something like an Easter brunch sculpture!
what I would change about my egg bunny for the next time
Well, I screwed up a few things on my first attempts at my egg bunny ice sculpture, so I’d fix the screwups first.
1) You can barely see it, but the back of the basket’s rim is engraved too deeply, so that it doesn’t look like it’s behind the eggs. That’s an easy fix; I just have to adjust the engraving depths.
2) The way I did the freezing surfaces for this piece have a couple consequences. Because of the ears, the freezing rim doesn’t follow the egg’s edge all the way around the top. It’s not a great look visually and I also found that if I don’t get the freeze at the top just right, you get meltwater occasionally dripping down my bunny’s face (on the inside of the ice). To fix this, I’ll likely change the ears, separating them from the egg shape slightly and extending the freezing surface around the top of the egg. That way, I can fix the visual problem and hopefully, the dripping problem.
Also, I’m considering adding some white details to my bunny. Maybe I’ll make his paws white so that they stand out between his face and the basket a bit more. I might also add white details to the basket, to give it a little more pop.
Ideally, I’ll make these changes before next Easter π€
links and stuff
As I said before, this egg bunny ice sculpture design is one of the newest designs on ice sculpting secrets. As you can see above, I put it together about the same time as I made my hatching chick design. There are also a bunch of other Easter designs on the site, including a waving bunny, an Easter bunny holding an egg, and many more.
Check out the design page for many more ice sculpture designs as well as a list of Easter designs. Also, check out the design usage guidelines to see what uses are permitted.
You could also find photos and info from this entry on the ice sculpting secrets Instagram account or the facebook page. ice sculpting secrets is also on TikTok, although videos there aren’t really tied to posts as much. You can comment on IG and fb as well as below. And if it won’t LET you comment below, which is possible, then definitely comment on fb and/or IG. Thanks!
