The End of Day Three

It’s the end of the third day of the competition and we’re very nearly finished!

Today felt like a really early start as we’re all quite tired now. We mainly had detailing to work on today, which meant we were sitting around doing it so got cold very quickly, plus it was quite windy! We had to finish the columns, taps, buckets, over flowing water and wall at the front. We thought we needed to add something around the basin on the front as otherwise there was a lot of empty space. We also thought it would be good to add some detail to the bucket as Daizhong had said we needed to show off our carving skills some more. We went with a similar pattern on the basin as is on the pillar tops so that they link.

We managed to have quite a productive morning which meant we could have a long lunch break to warm up again. After we’d eaten we went to see the ship museum within the Uni. There were lots of really intricate models of many different types of marine vessels on display which were rather interesting. One of our volunteers studies marine engineering so was keen for us to see it.

We also managed to get a fair bit done after lunch meaning that we didn’t have to stay too long after dinner. We called it a day at about half 7. One of Mr Du’s students is helping us finish off the arches tomorrow morning then we just need to sweep away any excess snow and smooth a few edges.

There are still people taking pictures everywhere and there are even photos on a few Chinese news websites, which caused a bit of excitement earlier! The competition ends at 10am tomorrow but it shouldn’t take us that long to finish it off so we’re confident that we can get it done in time. So now it’s just fingers crossed for the judging!!

Harbin Snow and Ice World

Hi again, Jess here :) We’re just on the way back from the Harbin Ice and Snow World. We went to visit it along with all the other competitors after we finished our day of sculpting.

The whole park was incredible! The sculptures were things we could only dream of making! The place looked amazing at night with it all lit up. Paul told us that he could see it being built from his uni room and it has taken about a month to complete! There were lots of places to climb up and look inside as well as a maze and quite a few slides. We managed to persuade Daizhong to go down one of the slides with us – he visits every year with the uni but said it was his first time going down it… and probably his last!

There were also chairs carved with the animal heads for each year on them. Imy and I are the year of the dog and Daizhong is the year of the rat. Needless to say that this, along with many of the other sculptures, provided many photo opportunities! We had all been looking forward to going and it definitely lived up to expectations!

Day 1 of the Competition!

Today we started our snow sculpture! It took us a while to mark it out as it was slightly shorter than we’d thought but Mr Du helped us with this. It doesn’t look like we’ve done much but we’ve got the majority of the excess snow dug out and started carving the first column and top. This should put us in a good position for a long day tomorrow.

  

One Day To Go...

The competition is nearly here and we are ready just in time!

We thought it was too good to be true when Mr Du said the second model was ‘wonderful’ the other day… we were right. We had to make a few changes to both as he was worried that they wouldn’t be interesting enough from all angles. He is also rather worried that a Greek person wouldn’t think our ionic columns are realistic, so it’s rather fortunate for us that there don’t seem to be any other Greeks here! We managed to finally finish them, write our plans of action and sharpen all our tools before dinner!

After dinner we attended the opening ceremony where we met Daizhong and one of the volunteers helping us. Imy and Andreas got up to introduce the team – we are block 19. There is also a team from Southampton University at this competition who are sculpting the Titanic, so it’ll be nice to meet them once we’ve started and see how they’re getting on with the snow and cold too!

We’re all getting an early night in preparation for an early start and long day tomorrow. We will hopefully have good news regarding our progress tomorrow evening!

Seeing in the New Year and Imy's Birthday

Hey!
After we’d warmed up from being out in the cold most the day, we asked a few of the students in the accommodation if they were celebrating New Years. An english guy on our floor said some of them would be going to an international bar and gave us the address so we could join them. Luckily, after a day of rest, Imy was feeling better so could join us too. It was a little different to back home (for starters we were in thermals and snow boots!) But it was nice to get out of our rooms for an evening and see in the new year together. Mr Du had said we could have the next morning off too so we were all still fast asleep when it turned 2015 back home!

 Today was Imy’s birthday! (Happy 21st Imy!) We had to improvise a little with a cake and candles; we found a cake in the shop and Nana made a candle out of some thread and the wax we have been modelling with. We had to get nearly the whole way through singing before lighting it though as it went out very quickly! We then continued with our model making before leaving a little early to head out for dinner. As we were celebrating we decided we’d have western food for a change – much to everyones delight, the Chinese seem to be big fans of Pizza Hut! We all had plenty of food and went home very happily full!

Back in the studio tomorrow for our last day of planning and tool prep before the competition starts!

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!