Afskyelig Is
The Abominable Ice Cream Monster was my own project. It was based on an idea, I just couldn't let go of. After a while I decided to realize it. The idea was to make a mobile ice cream van with a sculptural character on it. I used a 3-wheeled Piaggio Ape scooter with an open flat cargo bed. On the bed I placed a specially made steel frame with a small soft ice machine in it. Around the frame I fitted a fiber glass model of the Abominable Ice Cream Monster. If you pull his tail delicious soft ice cream would flow out of his butt. To help the design process, I did a lot of visual research and mood boards, but I also thought of the whole mythology around him. That helped a lot with the details.
In short the Abominable Ice Cream Monster is the Abominable Snow Mans simple cousin. The Abominable family is not so proud of him. He is a big, white, fat monster - looks a bit like a blob of ice cream. He has a happy, but simple mind. He really tries to live up to the Monster family's expectations of being horrible, but fails on a regular basis mainly because of his own childish sense of humor – like touring around Copenhagen on his scooter pooping in little kids waffles.
Some will probably feel that the concept is a bit disgusting, but to keep the associations on a more abstract level, I've only served vanilla ice cream from a vanilla-colored monster-butt.
The following line of pictures will explain the process of making him.
First sketches
Sketch with measures
Rough model cut in styrofoam over model of ice cream machine
Clay on styro foam. Really difficult part was to make a firm looking monster-butt, that would still fit a big soft ice between the cheeks
Stainless steel frame was fitted and bolted onto the scooter. Even a small ice cream machine weighs an impressing 111 kg, which had to be raised about 30 cm from the scooters cargo bed. Not to make the scooter too top heavy and unstable, it was secured in multiple places. I also had to keep in mind that max load-capacity on a scooter like this is 200 kg – with 111 kg taken up by the ice cream machine not a single unnecessary kg could go on.
Fiber glass was put onto the clay model, then cut in half and styro foam/clay model removed from the inside.
2 halves of the fiber glass model were painted, equipped with a closing mechanism and then fitted onto the stainless steel frame. This way you could easily get into the ice cream machine for refilling and cleaning.
Tail was fitted around the handle of the ice cream machine.
First day out.....
Even had customers
Homemade sign
A closer look at the action...
Since I only had one flavor of ice cream, I had to have a lot of toppings in a specially made rack fitted onto the scooter