The Ice Hotel opens in phases and the last phase is always the slide. This year's theme for the slide was all about snakes. I was assigned to the stairway area where people climb up the slide. The concept was that you go inside a cavern where you can see a giant snake slithering behind the alcoves. The body of the snake wasn't too hard to create. The challenge was actually trying to reproduce some believable and recognizable geological formations. You can always make it very cliché and cartoon-ish, but trying to make it realistic is quite harder. It's the kind of thing that we can easily recognize it, but we don't have an intuitive way to represent it. Erosion, geological build-up and sediment can have very complex textures : smooth, rough, jagged, rounded, ... all of those composed in one scene.
The scales look like complex work, but it's quite simple. I just carved lines over a grid and chipped one corner of every diamond.
The worst part of it all was the to work around all of the people. At this point, the hotel is 85% done and every workers get cramed up this last section.
I'm quite happy how this last part came up. It's a fine balance between making it curvy and rounded without it looking too soft.
