a fan coral ice sculpture carved by Roland Hernandez of Carving Ice at the 2011 Orange County Fair Ice Museum in Costa Mesa, CA



Like several other recent designs (the reef shark, sea turtle, and manta ray), this fan coral ice sculpture design is the result of my involvement at the Ice Museum at the 2011 OC Fair in Costa Mesa, CA. Only in this case, I didn’t carve the piece for the museum. Roland Hernandez, architect of the Ice Museum, carved the fan coral, or sea fan piece.

Fan corals are also called gorgonians and are a soft coral, lacking the stiff skeletal structure of other corals. A fan coral is really a colony of many smaller animals, all working together to do better than they would individually. Sea fans are primarily filter feeders, feeding on plankton that flow through their fan.





Two versions of the design are included. One is a cut through piece, similar to Roland’s sculpture above, while the other is a snowfilled version. The cut through version, while more realistic, can be time consuming to create and would not hold up nearly as long as the snowfilled version, so you can choose which would better fit your needs. I’d envision that this design might be combined with other undersea designs (like the reef shark, for example) to create a larger display.

Either design only requires a half block slab (4-5 inches thick) to create; fan corals are very thin and largely flat. You might want to incorporate a little curvature, but not much is required.







If you have any questions about this piece, email me or comment below. If you would like to use this ice sculpture design or any other design on this site, please check the design usage guidelines. The design collection page lists designs on the site.

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: sealife, animals, OC Fair Ice Museum, snowfill engraving