Snow Sculpture | Varun Mangalick

In March 2020, I came home to Minnesota at the start of Covid lockdowns. In early April, we had a typical large MN snowfall, and for the first time, I found myself with both the free time of youth as well as the engineering knowledge I had gained. It was time to make things out of snow. I only had the one big batch of snow to work with that winter, but I resumed my work the following year.

Snow sculpture: dude on couch

This sculpture was a group effort between me, Abhijit, and Brandon. We met up in a park and, seeing the benches lining the sidewalk, we decided to make a dude on a couch, roughly inline with the benches. The snow in the park had already been pretty stomped down, so we weren’t sure we’d have enough to make something big, but thankfully Brandon brought a shovel, and our snow pile grew soon enough. ...

Snow sculpture: rose

This next sculpture was one I made while visiting Neha. She was less excited about geometric figures, so we decided to make a rose! It was much warmer here than it had been in MN, so we didn’t need to start by piling up the snow and waiting for it to compress. We were able to just create our pile and immediately start carving out the base to make the basic shape of the rose. We weren’t able to finish on the first day, and unfortunately when we resumed a couple days later, the snow had melted and refrozen enough to become icy and brittle. As a result, we had to be far more cautious when we carved out the petals, and in certain places, the pedal edges collapsed anyways. However, I think the effect still ended up working pretty well! ...

Snow sculpture: hollow cube

This sculpture actually took a few intermediate forms before reaching its final state. My first goal was actually to create an igloo. I brought out a sturdy cardboard box and tried to pack snow into the form of bricks, but the wno was far too powdery. Unlike last April when I was making my snow dinosaur, it was quite cold out, and the same construction techniques would not work this time around. ...

Snow sculpture: dinosaur

As mentioned in my dino paintings blog post, I find dinosaurs to be a reasonable default subject for new artistic pursuits. With new snow on the ground, I wasted no time on deliberation and got started on my dinosaur! The weather was fairly warm, so the snow was easy to stick to itself. I was pretty concerned about the structural integrity of the neck and head, but the snow held fine! I was also able to dig out the space underneath the bellow so that the legs were each separate from each other. ...