A Very Festive Feeling NYE!

Seeing as we finished our models yesterday Mr Du said we could go into the city today. Two of his students came with myself, Andreas and Nana to show us round and attempted to teach us some Chinese! They took us to the shopping malls first and the Sophia Church. It was a lot smaller than we expected and grander from the outside than in but had some rather elaborate chandeliers! We made a quick stop at Starbucks after to warm up!

We went to a dumpling restaurant for lunch, we’re all managing well with chopsticks despite the dumplings being a little slippery to pick up! After lunch we walked down Central Street to the river. The streets were very pretty with snow-covered trees lining them. There were also lots of ice sculptures along them and people selling caramelised frozen fruit on sticks. We were all well wrapped up as it was snowing a little – it made us feel very Christmassy!

At the end of the street was a large river that was completely frozen over! It had people skiing on seats and riding in a horse and cart amongst other activities. We went down a long ice slide on sledges and we were towed behind a car on rubber rings. We got covered in snow but it was all good fun! We were even greeted back at uni by a Russian Santa who got us to sing Jingles Bells in return for some sweets!

Happy New Year from us all! xxx

Our Finished Models!

After a lot of hard work we have finally finished our wax models of both sculptures, including a larger model of the column top for the first sculpture. 

The Antithesis:

Time for Change:

Out First Taste of Snow Sculpting...

In preparation for the competitions, Mr Du and his class have to create a sculpture of the competition sponsor’s logo. This is made out of a block of snow the same size as the blocks we’ll be creating our sculptures from. They started making this sculpture yesterday and we went out to help for a bit, so that we learn how to use the tools correctly before the competitions.

Mr Du was very concerned that we have a lot of right angles in our design and was keen for us to practice making sharp angles. We marked out straight lines using dyed string and then used a couple of tools to cut it. We used one with a serrated blade to quickly dig out the snow, then another tool a bit like the fine side of a cheese grater, to smooth it off. It took us quite a while to get the angles right and we had to keep standing back to look at it, but we got there in the end! It was really useful and made a nice change from sitting in the studio. It wasn’t even that cold once we got going! It did feel quite high up though!

We’re hoping to make a start on the second model tomorrow, but for now we’re all pretty tired, so it’s an early night all round!

Merry Christmas From Harbin!

Hi!

We woke up nice and early on Christmas morning to get into the studio for 9am, though some of us are still waking up even earlier because of the time difference. The view from our rooms at sunrise is rather pretty which doesn’t make the early starts as bad!

 We spent the morning in the studio working on the models. At lunchtime we went to a different floor in the dining hall (it has five) to see what that had to offer. Nana and I really liked our dishes and managed to find veg, which made a nice addition to all the rice! Imy and Andreas found theirs a little spicy and got a bread roll as well to fill them up!

We went to buy ski goggles after this to wear whilst making the sculptures.  We then went back to the studio where there was a very cute puppy that had come in with one of the students to greet us.

We carried on with the models for the rest of the afternoon though it had obviously been a long day already for some of us!

Afterwards, the whole class went out for a Christmas meal. We sat around large circular tables and a variety of dishes were placed in the middle. The caterpillars were a particular favourite of Nana’s! The rest of us rather liked the fish and ribs!

It’s custom to down your drink when someone greets you here which quite a few of the students did, especially the guys with Andreas. Fortunately they only drink their beer out of little glasses! They then ordered some rice wine and introduced us to some chinese drinking games! After all the beers had been finished off we headed home. Mr Du said we didn’t have to be in until the afternoon today so we got a nice lie in for a change!

So all in all a pretty good Christmas day despite being on the other side of the world! Merry Christmas from all of us to everyone back home!

We've Arrived!

Hello from a very cold Harbin! The time difference and all the travelling has made sleeping a bit tricky so I thought I’d update you all on the trip so far.

After nearly 30 hours of travelling we got here last night! Amsterdam was very windy so our flight to Beijing got delayed meaning we missed our flight to Harbin. Luckily, after a lot of running around, we found the right desk where the assistant was very helpful and managed to get us on the next flight. It’s definitely been an adventure so far! We were all very glad to get to the accommodation and be able to have a hot shower then climb into bed!

It’s currently 6am and -22°C outside but nice and warm in the accommodation. We’ll be wrapping up well before going outside! There are lots of Christmas decorations around and everyone seems very friendly. We’re looking forward to meeting our tutor and other students in a few hours.

That’s it for now but hopefully there’ll be some pictures and more updates soon once we’ve got more to tell!

Designing the Sculptures

We’ve met up several times over the last few weeks to try and decide on our sculpture designs. We need two; one for the University Competition and one for the International Competition. The University one is first so we decided to do the slightly simpler design for that, knowing that we’ll probably learn a lot from this that we can take into the second competition for the more complicated design. It’s taken us a long while to finalise our designs and we seemed to be going round in circles at times! The second competition is the International one which professional ice sculptors compete in. Because our sculpture won’t be as good as others in terms of skill (they’ve had years of practice!) we decided it was best to go for designs that had a strong message behind them.

When we compared our individual designs we’d all tried to communicate global issues. We finally settled on the two designs below. For the University competition we decided on ‘The Antithesis’. A dripping tap alone wastes roughly 18,000 litres of water a year and yet nearly one tenth of the world’s population doesn’t have access to safe water. These statistics are shocking! This is what we wanted to convey in our design. At a glance both the front and back of the design illustrate a similar scenario; a tap and bucket. However, upon closer inspection you can see that they’re very different.

One side depicts a curved wall with 4 Greek columns and a tap with water flowing into a bucket. The tap has been left on and bucket is overflowing. The opposite side portrays an old stone wall that’s starting to fall down and an old wooden bucket. The tap above this bucket has no water running out of it. It’s clear that this scene is from a very different world to the other. We aimed to illustrate the polar opposites; how the wealthy have and waste so much without giving it a second thought whilst there are parts of the world struggling without.

Our second design ‘Time for Change’ aims to illustrate the destructive effect humanity has on the planet through global warming. It depicts a globe that is melting being held up by a hand. The melting represents global warming and the destructive effect that this is having on the earth – it’s quite literally melting! The addition of the hand represents that it’s humanity that has caused this. The way that the globe is melting onto the hand indicates that the effects of this will (eventually, if not yet) be felt by humanity. The hand is surrounded by power stations and is engulfed in smoke further landing the blame on humanity. However the way the hand is lifting the globe slightly above the smoke also gives hope; there is a way out, but it is down to us to change and make it happen.

We did realise that the fact these sculptures are being carved into large blocks of ice is a little ironic…

China For Christmas

I've been lucky enough to be one of four design students from NTU selected to take part in two International Snow Sculpture competitions in Harbin, China! This is an incredible experience and an amazing opportunity to explore a completely new culture, way of life and material! As none of us have worked in snow before (we're more used to sculpting and building up our work, rather than cutting away) it'll be a steep learning curve I'm sure! We fly out next Monday for four weeks, so we'll be spending Christmas there too! I'll keep this updated with my blogposts but you'll be able to see everyone else's here, enjoy!