Figures from zo ice. Do-it-yourself ice figures (photo): New Year's decoration of the territory of a country house

Original taken from vodolei_idei in "Ice Ideas" with your own hands

Ice is a whole world of entertainment in winter. Ice is beautiful. Ice is creative.
Ice is room for imagination and original ideas. Tableware, decor, games, candles and lamps, houses...
Something I'll try to tell you...

Ice is frozen water. Can you put flowers there? Someone came up with this idea - to put a rose in ice vase - it will melt, gradually opening the flower ... romantic ... But only for a winter party.

Follow the link - description http://pastelwhite.com/2012/12/23/diy-frozen-roses/

Ice Wreath. A regular cake mold will do to make it.

They will look bright and elegant in a winter snow garden.

But you can decorate them not only winter Garden, but also used as a festive table decor.

In order for the "stuffing" to shine through the ice beautifully, it must be transparent.

HOW TO MAKE ICE TRANSPARENT AT HOME?

But "muddy" opaque ice is also effective. Such ice can be made ice buckets for champagne and lamps for candles.

Transparent and opaque ice can be combined to achieve the desired effect, as in the bottom photo.
This is such a "wreath - candlestick".

You can freeze inside any filling - for example, shells.

original openwork candle can be done with ice.

ICE FLASHLIGHT FOR THE STREET

The craft of ice lanterns is that the water near the walls freezes faster than inside.
Therefore, when a sufficient layer of ice has frozen, excess water just pour.

To supplement it with something or not - the creator decides)

ICE WARE

Almost by the same principle, you can make ice glasses.

Containers for caviar from ice.

Ice dish for fruit it’s also easy to do - the shapes of a 5-liter water container are recognized, and the technology is the same: poured - froze - drained excess water.

And these summer ice containers with walls of flowers and herbs are unusually good, and just as simple in execution.

Cremanka for ice cream. What a beauty)))

various containers, different stuffing, different application.

By the way, the bottle does not have to be frozen - you can do ice stand under her.

Two containers of different diameters: the smaller one should correspond to the size of the bottle and be heavy (you need to fill it with something) so that water does not push it out.

And here is a very laconic stand.

In general, iceware is already made to order, professionally.

Buffet ice table at the wedding.

JUST ICE CUBES

Ice cubes are the easiest thing to create. But ordinary cubes can also be made festive, original.

Cubes with rosebuds, for example.

Or with cherries.

Or - with berries cut into pieces?

Or - with fruit juice or puree.

Or - very gently - with flowers.

FIGURED ICE.

Ice figurines - the simplest ones - can be made by pouring it into disposable glasses or yogurt containers, adding dyes, berries and leaves, bright plastic toys of your choice.

And the thread must be frozen there - hung on branches.

A more complicated mold can be molded from foil.

And confess your love to your (your) beloved (beloved). Inexpensive and touching idea for Valentine's Day.

You can freeze ice in children's molds.

It’s not bad to freeze a snowflake inside or tint it.

Perfect fit and different forms- for ice.

Yes, and just freeze a layer of water in a dish, put something there - it will turn out round ice pendant.

Inside is a frozen napkin.

Lime inside.

Pendant with orange and berries.

UNUSUAL FIGURES

By purchasing original forms, you can do, for example, ice rings.

Different forms - different figures.
But with the help of a rubber glove you can make famous Halloween ice hand.

For a cocktail.

For cold soup.

What about playing?

ICE PINS

Need:
9 plastic bottles filled with 0.5 - 1 liter of water,
1-3 balloons, a small amount of ink or other paint,
1 night of time for the skittles and balls to freeze.

Ice works of art are born in a workshop located in the large New York area of ​​Queens. It takes a master from a couple of hours to several days to create one sculpture.

Sculptures are often commissioned for various events and shows. Sometimes even customers are asked to create entire rooms from ice. The cost of such pleasure is quite high and can reach a quarter of a million dollars.

Shintaro Okamoto learned how to work with ice from his father, a sculptor with forty years of experience. The man admires the properties of this material and even considers it "alive".

To create his masterpieces, Shintaro even makes ice himself. In his workshop there are special huge freezers.

AT different time such famous show business stars as Rihanna and Jay-Z ordered ice sculptures from the master.

The sculptor says that a wide variety of tools are required to create ice masterpieces. The choice depends on what needs to be emphasized.

Before starting work, the master picks up an ice block right size and makes a pencil sketch.

The finished ice figure is placed back in the refrigerator. During transportation, the sculpture is wrapped in insulating blankets and loaded into a van.

The highest sculpture of the master is a 7.6-meter-high ice heart, installed in the central part of New York's Times Square on Valentine's Day.

An interesting task for the sculptor was once set by the firm "Old Navy". Customers asked to create a huge block of ice and freeze a thousand flip flops in it. Then the residents of Manhattan were asked to get themselves a pair of shoes by melting the ice with their hands.

Western countries have long been practicing decorating for the New Year not only the interior of houses, but also the streets, paying special attention to the decor of the backyard territory. For example, icy New Year's decorations for the street are very popular with them, but such decor is quite suitable for our latitudes. Moreover, making street decorations from ice is very easy, as well as fun, entertaining and completely inexpensive. In fact, to make ice street decorations, you need water, a couple of decorative elements(we will talk about this in more detail below), a suitable shape, as well as a spacious freezer or hard frost on the street.

How to make street decorations out of ice.

How to make an ice wreath.

Festive wreaths can decorate the branches of trees or shrubs.

Method number 1. We take a ready-made pudding mold with a vertical insert in the center. We spread bright berries and green twigs (spruce, fir or arborvitae) along the bottom of the form, fill the form with water. We send the form with water to the freezer, until the water completely solidifies. After the water turns into ice, pour into a bowl hot water and immerse the form with ice in it, with a sharp change in temperature, the ice inside the form will melt along the edges, and you can easily pull out the wreath. Backwardness is only to hang a wreath on a satin ribbon.

Method number 2. We take ready-made small forms for puddings, lay out the composition from the berries and branches of the arborvitae on the bottom, fill each mold cold water and put in the freezer. After the water turns into ice, the form can be immersed in hot water for literally one minute, pull out miniature wreaths and hang them on trees with ribbons.

Method number 3. In the center of a round deep shape, we set a glass or a jar, put twigs, berries, leaves, citrus peels around, and pour in water. To prevent the jar in the center from floating into it, you can pour water or pour stones. It remains to set the form in the cold, wait until the ice hardens, pull out the wreath and hang it on a ribbon.

Method number 4. In a baking dish with a vertical insert in the center, lay out acrylic snowflakes and Christmas balls, pour in a little water, put the product in the freezer. When the first layer of water freezes, lay out a few more balls in a circle, pour in water again and put in the freezer, after freezing add more balls and put the mold in the freezer for the last time, take out the wreath, tie a ribbon and hang the product on a street tree.

Photo of ice wreaths.

How to make ice balls.

Method number 1. We prepare the required number of balloons, pour water into them and pour out the food coloring, mix the water inside by shaking the balloons. We tie the balls and set them in the freezer or on the street frost. When the water inside the balls hardens, cut the shell with a knife and take out the colored ice balls.

Method number 2. You will need a special form for making ice balls (for drinks), you can put berries or sprigs of spruce on the bottom of this form, as well as put hanging ropes, pour in water and put in the freezer until completely solidified.

How to make an ice candlestick.

Method number 1. In the center of the food container we put a glass with stones (for weighting). We pour in water and lay sprigs of spruce or arborvitae on top, and also pour viburnum, lingonberry or dogwood berries. We put the mold in the freezer, after the water hardens, we take out the candlestick and put a lit candle in the center.

Method number 2. We take two bottles of 1.5 liters and 0.5 liters of different sizes, cut each bottle in half, put the smaller bottle into the larger one, fix them with adhesive tape, put berries, leaves and tree branches between the walls, pour in water, and send the product into the freezer. After turning the water into ice, we take out the future candlestick from the mold, and put a lit candle inside.

Photo of various ice candlesticks.

Ice tree pendants.

Round flat pendants are made as follows, various berries, twigs or flowers are laid out on the bottom of a flat round plate, everything is filled with water, a pendant thread is placed on top, the composition is placed in the freezer, then pulled out, separated from the plate and hung on trees.

Ice stars.

1. To make stars, you can use ice molds in the form of stars or baking dishes, to create ordinary stars, fill the molds with water and freeze in the freezer.
2. To create colored stars, you must first add food coloring to the water.
3. For bright compositions, you can put berries, various twigs, leaves, or add glitter into the molds.

Ice cubes.

We lay out various flowers or fruit slices in square-shaped ice molds, pour water here and freeze. Then we take out the ice cubes and decorate them with street flowerpots, tree branches and other yard elements.

Ice shards.

We paint the water blue, pour it into rectangular shape in a thin layer, send the form to the freezer, after solidification, hit the ice surface with a kitchen hammer, select beautiful fragments and put them somewhere on the street.

Frozen heart.

Method number 1. At the bottom of a round plate, lay out the pebbles in the form of a heart, fill it with water and put it in the freezer, then take out the product and place it with an edge on a flat surface.

Method number 2. We put berries and pine needles in a heart-shaped baking dish, send the form to the freezer, then remove the product from the form and put it somewhere in a conspicuous place in the yard.

How to make ice garlands.

In the ice mold, lay out a dense woolen thread in a circle, pour in water, and put the mold in the freezer, after the water has hardened, gently pull the end of the rope, all the ice should pop out of the mold after it. To get a colored garland, the water must first be tinted with food coloring.

Instead of an ice mold, you can take the base from a box of chocolates.

How to effectively decorate the house for the New Year:

Christmas decorations made of ice will help you quickly, simply and inexpensively decorate the site for the upcoming holiday. If you have not yet tried to create street decorations from ice, then we recommend that you urgently correct the situation, we assure you that you will definitely like this pastime.

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Half a century ago, no one had heard of ice sculpture. Now every winter around the world in major cities and small villages, you can see people who are concentrated on hewing blocks of ice in order to build a palace out of them or create a gallery of fairy-tale characters.

China can be called the birthplace of ice sculpture, and not without reason: three hundred years ago, in the vicinity of Harbin, fishermen, going fishing in the winter, took ice lanterns with them on cold windy nights. They were made very simply: a basket of water was exposed to frost, then ice was taken out of it, a hole was hollowed out in it and a candle was inserted inside. Returning from fishing, the fishermen left their lanterns on the shore, and during traditional winter holidays children played with them. Gradually, children's games grew into an ice lantern show, and starting in 1963, into a popular ice sculpture festival. Now every year in January-February, residents of Harbin admire huge buildings made of ice bricks, gardens, waterfalls, Gothic cathedrals, carved flowers and dragons in city parks.

However, in fairness, it is worth recalling that the first recognized world masterpiece of ice architecture was created in Russia. In 1740, for the entertainment of the terminally ill Empress Anna Ioannovna, the Ice House was built in St. Petersburg, where all the furniture, curtains, dishes and even the cards lying on the tables were cut out of ice. Ice firewood in an ice fireplace burned, smeared with oil, an ice elephant at the entrance threw jets of water upwards, and ice cannons fired, respectively, ice balls. As you know, the “fun wedding” of the court jester Prince Golitsyn and the widow Buzheninova was also celebrated in this house. But the main thing is that the house itself made such a deep impression on contemporaries that they did not spare words, describing it for posterity.

However, ice art became widespread in our time, when power tools appeared that could significantly speed up the process of creating short-lived art objects.

Ice is a versatile material, suitable for figures and buildings of all sizes. And for the giant copy of the Great Wall of China in Harbin (2003), which you can walk along, and for the guillotine, created by American craftsmen at the festival in Ohio in 2006, and for the "flying" swans, made by Krasnoyarsk sculptors at the Perm festival in 1999 . At the championship in Fairbanks (Alaska) in 2005, American sculptors led by Stephen Berkshire carved a huge shark jumping out of the water right at the viewer, and a year later they created the thinnest traces of the legendary “Balto team”, which rushed down a steep hill to deliver in Nome, a life-saving shipment of diphtheria vaccine. At the same championship, but already in 2007, the American Peter Slavin and the Japanese Yunishi Nakamura created "weightless" wings, antennae and legs of a giant grasshopper.

Working with ice is similar to working with stone or wood, with the only difference that in this case it requires compliance with temperature regime. As soon as the thermometer falls below minus 35°C, the ice becomes brittle and brittle, which means that at any moment a crack can pass through the workpiece, and then start all over again.

The tradition of international festivals of ice art was laid by the Japanese. In 1950, local high school students in Sapporo made six snow sculptures. Ice began to work later. Now the festival annually presents more than three hundred snow and ice compositions. The construction of each of them takes 48 hours. Ice figures are exhibited in Odori Park and Susukino (in the hope that they will attract crowds of visitors to his entertainment establishments).

An ice festival can be given a specific theme, such as at the Korkeasaari Zoo near Helsinki, where the first part of the festival is traditionally devoted to animals. In Russia - in Perm, the festival called "And snow, and ice, and fire" is held for the 14th time. Festivals are usually held in countries where winter frosts allow you to keep the sculpture under open sky at least a week, for the duration of the events.

One of the most significant international ice festivals is held in Alaska, in the already mentioned city of Fairbanks. It is organized in the form of competitions, where the participants are given a certain time to work, and the jury selects the winners in different categories and awards the title of world champion. Local ice, by the way, is considered the best. After all suitable material for an ice sculpture it is not easy to find: it must be as clean as possible, without sand and algae, otherwise the tools will quickly become dull. Dirty brown ice from the pond is suitable for building a winter town with slides, but not for high-class sculpture. High-quality ice should freeze quickly and at very low temperatures so that bubbles do not have time to form. Ice blocks can also be made in an industrial refrigerator, but this takes a lot of time - a brick laid according to the standard with a size of 1 × 1.5 × 0.25 meters freezes in such an installation for several days. Meanwhile, even a small festival requires several hundred tons of ice. In Fairbanks, in winter, the temperature drops below minus 40 ° C, and the blocks with a bluish tint, extracted from the local river, are so clean and transparent that you can read a newspaper through a meter layer of ice.

Children's amusement park in Nashville, USA. To keep it for two months, it is necessary to maintain a temperature of minus 9 ° C

Working alone with blocks that weigh up to a hundred kilograms is difficult, so teams of two and four people come to Alaska. The pair work for 60 hours, carving the intended object from a solid block of ice. Fours are given 110 hours to work. During this time, she must build a composition of many small bricks. Before the master begins to implement the pre-designed sketch, the blocks must be cut out of the river, at the risk of falling into the wormwood, dragged out of there with the help of tongs and ropes, dragged into a truck and delivered to the place. Here they are leveled, polished, moistened with water, and after a few minutes, when the bricks freeze to each other, processing begins. To create an ice sculpture, the same tools are used as for woodcarving. The best are Japanese cutters, which are produced specifically for processing ice, but their cost is very high - tens of thousands of dollars. Therefore, ordinary cutters and saws, as well as many other tools, are used.

Extra pieces of ice can be cut off with an ax, but from this the workpiece is covered with a network of small scratches, becomes cloudy, so a saw is most often used. Some masters, in order to avoid chips and cracks on the future lace or flower, remove the ice layer by layer with a razor, and only when it remains to remove just a little, they take a hacksaw, and then a cutter for turning small details. And now comes the final stage - polishing. The surface of the product is treated with a grinding wheel or a grater with metal spikes, and the patterns are cut with a grinder. To smooth out irregularities, remove scratches, add shine and make the ice shimmer, the figure is blown with a hairdryer, an iron, an electric soldering iron or even a medical device for cauterizing bleeding is applied to the surface - a thermal cautery. In special cases, in order not to inadvertently melt the excess, the ice is smoothed with the palm of your hand.

The color of the sculpture is given by highlighting or tinting. artificial ice still in the freezing stage. The masters treat the last method with coolness: colored ice loses its ability to play under the sun's rays. To emphasize the details, they often resort to another method. Grooves are cut out on the surface of the figure and filled with snow, paint, colored sand. This technique is often used by Tazana Raukar, a Montenegrin sculptor who, as part of the American team, won the World Championships in Fairbanks six times. This is how the mottled giraffe skin was created in the Animal Parade composition, which brought her team the championship in the Real Art category in 2005.

“Ice sculpture is like doping,” says American Steve Lester, who works with stone and wood in addition to ice. And for Viktor Chernyshev, this passion, which he contracted more than 20 years ago, led to the creation of the Association of Russian Sculptors for snow, ice and sand compositions and the organization of festivals throughout the country.

Ice sculpture often depicts heroes of popular cartoons and classic works, birds and animals, biblical characters. In Harbin you can see the figures of political leaders, Russian masters copy the plots of the paintings of the Tretyakov Gallery, in Antwerp the heroes of Rubens' paintings are popular, and in Austrian city Graz for Christmas somehow carved an ice nativity scene - Mary, Joseph, Jesus in the manger and the Magi. Among the ice architecture, small copies of famous buildings, Big Ben, for example, or St. Basil's Cathedral, are not uncommon.

Work on ice, as a rule, requires high skill. The paradox lies in the fact that the compositions coming out from under the artist's chisel often acquire the features of a folk attraction. Ice restaurants and ice baths are being built, wedding table decorations and party utensils are made from ice. By independent projects in Sweden and Finland, ice hotels are built every winter. Tourists get the main pleasure here from new experiences, spending the night in an alpine sleeping bag on an ice bed at a temperature inside the “suite” of minus 3 ° C. At the festival in the Belgian city of Bruges, those who wished were offered to wash in an ice shower at a temperature of minus 12 ° C. Maybe such creativity does not quite fit into the concept of "art", but people like unusual sensations.

Perm Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival – www.ice.raid.ru
Alaska Ice World Championship - www.icealaska.com

The courtyard of a house or cottage in winter looks much more boring than in summer - frozen nature and snowdrifts on both sides of the cleared paths ... A monotonous picture. But with the approach of the winter holidays, when thoughts of New Year's fairy tale, so I want to see something unusual around, special in a winter way!

You can create a winter fairy tale in your own yard with your own hands, and this will be especially useful if there are children in the house. Of course, the traditional Christmas tree in the yard will be beautifully decorated and trimmed, and ice and snow sculptures will help make the snow-covered garden truly wonderful.

ice sculptures

It is generally accepted that only a professional can create an ice sculpture. This is not entirely true, because sometimes you just have to try - and everything will work out! Of course, such work will take time, tools available in almost every household and, of course, ice.

However, before starting the search for a suitable ice block, think about the sketch future sculpture. Ideas for ice images can be generated independently, taken from the Internet, sculpted from plasticine, drawn, etc. If you are not looking for difficult ways - just try to reproduce your baby's favorite toy from ice.

Concerning source material , freezing tap water is not worth it: the ice will turn cloudy. A great option is water from your own well or an ice bar carved into the nearest frozen body of water with a chainsaw. But the ideal material for winter creativity will be artificial ice, which is produced at cold storage facilities. The product from it will not melt even during small thaws.

If you plan to create a large enough sculpture or an entire composition, you will most likely have to combine several ice bars into a single whole at the very place where the sculpture will be created. Decide on the location of the future creation and start laying the ice bars. Fill each layer with water and immediately lay the next row of elements. As a result, you will get a monolith, from which all that remains is to cut off everything superfluous. By the way, this is how fortresses are built from ice “bricks”.

To make ice sculptures, you will need some instruments of those intended for construction and for working with wood. If you have to break off large enough pieces of ice from the monolith, you can use a chainsaw or a regular saw. For finer work, you can use scrapers - straight and angled. A straight scraper is useful for chipping off pieces of ice from a monolith, and an angled one will be convenient to shape the ice sculpture and make grooves. You may also need a chisel, chisel, or other tool of your choice. Ice is a rather malleable material, it will not be difficult to work with it, and you will certainly acquire the necessary skill with experience.

After the work is completed, pour water on all sides of the statue and wrap it tightly with polyethylene. After a while, it can be removed.

Worth a few words about coloring ice sculptures from ice. If you wish, you can try to make a blank for a product from tinted water, but getting the desired effect in this case is not easy - it's a trial and error method. Watering the sculpture with tinted water is also not effective - the lower part of the sculpture will be painted more intensely than the top. It is better to apply tinted water with a brush in layers, achieving the desired shade - time consuming, but effective. So you can paint not the whole statue, but only its individual elements. But not painted, but illuminated sculptures look especially impressive, so if possible, use this technique.

Alternative to sculpting

Feeling like a real sculptor is certainly great, but for this activity you need to allocate time, which is usually not enough before the holiday. But for those whose desire to decorate the garden with ice sculptures is supported by some financial opportunities, there is an alternative: freezing ice in special forms.

Ice sculpture molds are sold in specialized supermarkets and can also be purchased online. Not too much sophisticated technology will allow you to make exquisite ice decorations for your garden. And not only them!

In a similar way, but in less cumbersome forms, iceware can be made: fruit vases, champagne buckets, wine glasses. Such products can be used both for their intended purpose - for serving a New Year's banquet at outdoors, - and as garden ornaments. Just imagine: an ice vase with a spruce branch, a couple of cones and a rowan brush on a table in the gazebo - well, isn't it charming?

Non-banal snowmen

If you don’t have time to make ice sculptures, and you don’t have the funds for ice sculpture molds, this is not a reason to leave the yard mundane and boring. Even the most ordinary snowman, one of the symbols of Russian winter fun, can decorate your yard. However, a lot can be molded from snow - there would be a desire to create. Moreover, from snow, as well as from ice, you can create real sculptural masterpieces! True, this is somewhat more difficult than making an ordinary snowman.

Snow for sculptures is prepared in a special way: it is pressed until a dense substance is obtained in a container of a suitable shape. This will be the basis for the sculpture. A wooden or wire frame can be mounted in it, which will further give the product stability. Snow for garden decorations must be the cleanest, otherwise the result may not be as presentable as we would like.

To create a sculpture, you will need all the same scrapers, spatulas, chisels. Work with pliable snow will go faster than with ice. To correct not the most successful movements of the "sculptor's cutter", as well as to create small details, "snow dough" is used: the container is half filled with water, then snow is poured into it. The resulting mass should adhere well to the main part of the sculpture. The finished product must be poured with water.

Snow figurines are good because they can be painted to your taste. There are no special restrictions in the choice of colors and shades: you want vivid images- paint the sculptures in rich colors. To ensure that the paint lays evenly on enough large surface you can use a spray bottle. Try to use food coloring, which will not damage the plants in the future.

Snow sculptures are less durable than ice sculptures, but they are worth the effort. Sculptures made of ice and snow placed in different corners garden, will create a real winter fairy tale in it. Walking in such a garden will be no less interesting than in summer. Its special, unique charm will make your New Year and Christmas holidays even more pleasant and romantic.