a new rose ice sculpture design, just for Mother’s Day
yeah, another rose ice sculpture design
I have an old rose ice sculpture design on the site already. This new one is bigger and better though. When I first designed the old snow rose, I thought it was awesome. But it hasn’t aged well. This one is way better and and full color!
Roses play into many ice sculptures, whether they’re part of the design, part of an arrangement that goes with the sculpture, or frozen into the ice itself. This makes sense, since roses have symbolism related to many kinds of events, all the way from the Kentucky Derby to weddings. Here are some things you might not know about roses.
the rose element
I stole the rose design…from myself. I used almost an identical rose, a lot of them actually, in the Derby horse head design that I posted recently for Kentucky Derby events. I grabbed one of those roses and made it bigger. I changed it a little and added some leaves and a stem, but it’s essentially the same. It saves time and you’d have probably never known if I didn’t say anything. Yup, I’m lazy.
as you can see in the final rose ice sculpture, I shied away from the Christmas coloring in the initial design. It was a fast choice for the initial client approval. I changed my mind afterwards. I don’t think the client minded the improvement.
making a rose sandwich
If you checked out the helpful rose facts link that I supplied earlier, you found out that roses are edible. This is something I didn’t know until today, yet I was still making a rose sandwich when I made this rose ice sculpture.
Fine, so it’s a different kind of sandwich! I’m sandwiching all the detail into the middle of the sculpture by freezing two slabs together. This is a technique (influenced, of course, by techniques from many other ice sculptors) that I’ve been working on for the last few months. It’s been very promising and hopefully I’ll put together more info about it soon. But look at the template below and it’ll likely make a little more sense.
like several other recent designs (egg bunny, high heel shoe for Mother’s Day, and more), the rose ice sculpture is a sandwich design. I engrave on the back of the front slab and then freeze the back slab on to protect the detail. All the detail ends up in the middle of the ice. Oh, the base of the sculpture isn’t shown in the design template. I always forget.
my crappy π© attempts at gradients
I’m being a little overly self-deprecating here. I wasn’t really trying to make gradients in the rose when I was coloring it with sand. Mainly I was trying to add highlights, with some pink accents. I didn’t do the best job in the world, but it does add some visual interest. I like it a lot better than the flat, dimensionless red in the original design.
The process for the highlights is stupid simple. Before I added the red, all I did was grab some pinches of pink sand and dribbled them in areas that I thought would make good highlights. Once that was done, I covered up the pink with red, snowed it, and froze it in place. I did a similar thing with the leaves and stem, although those were a bit more like ACTUAL gradients. Still not really, but closer.
CNCing the rose ice sculpture: an oopsie
Sharp eyed observers will notice that I goofed a little setting the depths for the rose ice sculpture. Especially in the “Mom” part, it’s easy to see a few elevation changes that shouldn’t be there. That’s because I set the depths at different spots for the 1/2″ end mill and the 3/16″ end mill that I used. I’ve had this problem before and I have a procedure to avoid it, but I forgot and made the same mistake I’ve made in the past.
What happens is that when I run the 1/2″ endmill on the front slab, part of the run is a flattening cut that shaves off .15″ and makes the surface VERY flat. But I set the depth at the center of the ice slab, at the original height. After I run the 1/2″ end mill toolpath, that original height is gone and I can’t use it to set the height for the 3/16″ toolpath.
So to set the 3/16″ toolpath height, I go to part of the slab that hasn’t been cut and set it there. This is my mistake. In theory, both heights should be identical. In practice, they aren’t. I currently use an Alaskan mill to cut my ice slabs. This is a “pretty good” way to cut flat slabs of ice but definitely not perfect. (I MIGHT find a spot that is a perfect match for my first height. But that’s hard to do.) The differences in heights across the slab are enough to create the elevation change that you see in “Mom.”
The way to solve this problem is to think ahead. I need to set my depths for the 1/2″ and 3/16″ runs at the same spot. Which means I need to pick a spot that will never get cut during the initial 1/2″ end mill run. Since that run includes a flattening portion, I have to pick a spot outside of the design, in the extra ice that I’ll eventually discard. Doing that gives me a much better height match across the two runs. Next time π
links and stuff
Since this is clearly a Mother’s Day design, I might as well link to all the other Mother’s Day designs that I have on the site. Also, eventually, I’m going to do posts on the sandwich method that I use for this sculpture and using sand to color ice. But not yet.
Speaking of designs, check out the design usage guidelines.
Finally, 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. Since this is a newer post, you probably can comment below. But if not, then definitely comment on fb and/or IG. Thanks!
