While carving “Rapunzel,” the huge ice luge atop our record setting ice bar, we were making onsite changes to the design, so rather than using a template, I drew directly on the ice with a red marker. (see below) It was around -20˚F at the time.



The other day I got an email asking for advice on how to "write on the ice." Right away, I sent back an email that explained which kinds of magic markers let you write on ice when it's still frozen (not while it's melting). Well, you can probably see where this is going: that's not what he meant. He was talking about the snowfill engraving process, in which you engrave your writing or graphics into the surface of the ice and then fill the engraving with white snow, add water, and let it freeze solid.

Clearly, this opened the door to a need on this site: a detailed description of the snowfill engraving process, complete with pictures, videos, and lots of writing. It also sounds like a lot of work though, so today, I'm going with the other option: a brief discussion about drawing on ice with markers. In fact, some of it's already written, because I can copy and paste from the email response. So then, easy day today…where are people meeting for Happy Hour?

As if that was the only thing I had to do. But look for the snowfill entry later. Could be much later, but it will happen. Back to the markers.

As I recall, the first time that I became aware that you could write and draw on ice with markers was around 2000. I was in Bruges, Belgium working on a large ice display for Inaxi. I might have known that markers worked on ice before that, but that's the furthest back I can remember using them so far. (And I'm not taking credit for the idea; somebody else showed me that it would work.) At any rate, I believe Inaxi had only recently taken over management of this event from somebody else, so things were still changing quickly. And were just carving whatever needed to be carved. So no template, just draw on the ice and cut it out. So the markers worked great and were much easier to use than trying to sketch on the ice with a chisel or something similar. (But in general, you’ll still get better results if you take the extra time to prepare a template whenever possible.)


This Japanese brand of marker (from Icecrafters) writes on ice quite well.

So, if you carve in the freezer or in freezing temps, you will find certain types of markers to be very useful. There are probably others (google "freezer pen"?), but I know of two that will draw on cold ice. (If you already know of others, please comment below.) These are the Magic Ink marker that Icecrafters sells (my personal favorite) and the widely available Sanford Sharpie marker with the stripes on the barrel. Sanford recently changed the formula for their markers, taking out the Xylene. At least one ice carver has found them to be less effective after they did that, but they WILL still write on the ice, just maybe not as well. Xylene, on the other hand, can be abused as an inhalant, so I suppose I can get by without it in my markers. Besides, there might still be Xylene in the red magic ink markers; I can't read Japanese, so I don't know.


Both of these striped markers come from the same company, Sanford. The Sharpie is the newer, Xylene-free version



The markers are useful even when you're using a template because eventually the template has to come off, maybe before it's done all it could for you. And a template usually won't work very well on a 3D surface, but you can still work out your plan with a marker. Even use the marker to alter the template some if it's not working for you. In a nutshell, an ice marker can help you plan out your piece in a non-destructive way and that should result in better sculptures. So have an ICE Day!


Sharpie blue and black markers were used to write on this frozen slab of ice

You might also find photos and info from this entry on the ice carving secrets facebook page and you can comment there as well as below. Thanks!

Tags: ice marker, design