This is the tag end of my latest Reader column for the end of the week. It appears that I’ll be able to keep up the weekly columns for February. I had a couple queued up when I decided to write one about my latest snow sculpture of Abe Lincoln and his son Tad. It has a cheery title Tad and Dad.
I decided the sculpture I was working on of a photograph of the two might not translate to snow well. Because I don’t generally abandon tough projects I wanted to let my readers, at least, know what was on my front yard. Its explained in the column. I’ve sculpted Abe twice before this. The first time was his profile in my version of Mt. Rushmore where sculptor Borglum placed him in a corner and never fully chiseled out his face. He used explosives to do that and jack hammers.
He also had a decade to do the work. If lucky I might get a week of good weather. The weather has been fair but not ideal. It brought snow a week ago which I began piling up in front of the rainbow constructed earlier. The pile was more snow than I would need but I would have to find a way of building Abe and Tad a few feet higher than my pile once the snow was cold and hard. I had to cook snow to do that. In this case I filled large plastic boxes with fresh snow, brought them down to my basement laundry room and let them get melty for four or five hours. I had to guess where to put the snow when I added it to the Mt. Fuji of snow I would be carving away to show a book resting on the lap of Lincoln.

The face of Lincoln has been improved but I’m disappointed in it. I may tinker with it again today. I also carved the two characters too far apart. I might saw Tad off at the waste and push his two hundred pound torso six inches closer to his snow father. If I do that will be precarious work as both the heads required me to drive a broom handle down to make sure they wouldn’t fall off.
My clay model was actually pretty close to the proper placement. Here it is posed near the photo.

I’ve learned that a simple model saves me time by showing me where I will need to put the sculpting snow. If you imagine the pile I started with its fuji like top would have been above the book not quite at neck level with Abe. I had to build shoulders on fuji’s flanks and later top off the cone to dig down to Lincoln’s lap.
After my first stab at the faces I built them from my eye level although as seen from the vantage point of cars below the faces were pointed away from the lap where each was looking down. I sawed off Lincoln’s face at an angle from the bridge of the nose to the neck’s adams apple. I may cook some snow and see if before Lincoln’s birthday on Wednesday I can’t improve it. I am scheduled to donate blood at 1:30 this afternoon so I supposed to end strenuous activity and tomorrow will be cold and windy. I have about ten comments about the news but I think this will be it for todays blogging.
Oh and to give you a sense of what it would take to move Tad imagine me slicing through his spine and pushing him six inches closer to his dad. The metal rebar in the foreground is about where the right side of Tad’s head would nestle closer to Abe.

