I’ve picked out a few examples of an often challenging kind of ice art: the ice portrait. In its simplest terms, it’s just an accurate rendering of a person’s likeness using ice techniques. In practice, it can be quite difficult to make a recognizable transition from life to ice. All of these portraits have a couple of things in common. The first is New Orleans. Ellen DeGeneres (above) is an New Orleans native. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt (below) recently bought a house in New Orleans and Brad has been active in the city’s rebuilding. Huey Long (bottom) is probably Louisiana’s most famous governor and was the obvious inspiration for the character Willie Stark in the film “All the King’s Men.” The latest incarnation of this movie was partly filmed in New Orleans just before Hurricane Katrina. The other thing that these portraits have in common is Ice Culture. Julian Bayley graciously provided the color portrait examples and the Huey Long portrait was done on an Ice Culture CNC that had been modified to use Dean Carlson’s I-Sculpt software.

    As with any potentially intimidating project, if you break it down into manageable steps, it becomes a lot less scary. The first step in creating an ice portrait is to get the right photo of the person. This step is crucial. You need a good photo of the person that portrays them in a way that people are used to seeing them. Everyone is used to seeing Ellen DeGeneres with a big smile and Angelina always looks sexy. The special features of the person need to be well presented. Look at Angelina’s lips and Brad’s eyes. Nicely contrasting shadows that emphasize their features can be very important as well, particularly in white only snowfill portraits like the Huey Long example.

    The next step is to simplify the color scheme or “posterize” the image. This means that you drastically reduce the number of colors in the image while still maintaining a recognizable portrait. Photos have the appearance of continuous tones, which can mean the use of millions of colors. You really need to get the number of discrete colors down to the single digits, so you’re discarding a lot of information. For the Huey Long portrait, this step was particularly difficult, because I only had two “colors” at my disposal: white and clear ice. For the color portraits, you have a lot more variety available, but you still have to deal with your available color palette (i.e., what colors of sand or paint can you get?) and the limitations of your tools and the ice. Each additional color can mean a lot more time that has to go into the portrait.

    Angelina’s and Brad’s portraits give us an opportunity to take a closer look at the posterization process. Not counting her makeup, Brad has at least one more color in his hair and face than Angelina has. Angelina’s portrait looks a bit like a Patrick Nagel work, or even out of a comic book, while Brad’s retains more realism. Now this could easily be an intentional effect; the designer might have wanted Angelina’s look for some reason or it could also be a consequence of the photo they chose to base their design on. But as you simplify a portrait so that you can portray it in ice, you move in Angelina’s direction, removing the little details that add realism. So it becomes a tradeoff and a judgement call where to stop the posterization.

    Once you’ve posterized your photograph, then you begin to move from design to execution of the portrait. You need to create some sort of “map” to achieve the portrait. If you’re hand carving the ice, then your map might be a template, or even a serious of templates. If you’re using a CNC machine to engrave the ice, then there is no template, but the design is properly programmed into the computer with the design software. Snowfill only designs like Huey (below) can be carved from the front or back of the ice, while color portraits must be carved from the back of the ice sheet to enable the addition of color.

    If you’re hand carving the portrait, then I would recommend staying at the simpler end of the scale, such as Huey below. You might try a design with a few colors, but if you have 10 or more colors in your portrait, than I would strongly suggest using a CNC. I realize this might be easier said than done, but a complex color portrait like those above is best rendered on a CNC machine because it can give you the subtle depth differences necessary to get many different colors into the ice. It’s certainly possible to render a complex color piece by hand, but the required amount of time in the freezer would certainly make me think twice.

Once the color map has been generated, then the portrait execution becomes a technical exercise in creating the necessary different levels in the ice and then adding the different colors. It can be a slow, painstaking process, even if you use a CNC. But the results can definitely be worth the effort.

    Portraits have long been a very important part of the art world and, in the last few years, they’ve become part of the ice art world as well. With some definite “how did they do that?” appeal, an ice portrait can be that unique element that helps to make a special event really special.