20160108 - snowflakes

Gallery: 

How to draw snowflakes the size of soccer fields

How does snow artist Simon Beck trace massive, intricate patterns in the snow? With a little math and a lot of legwork.

Simon Beck (TEDxKlagenfurt Talk: Snow art) believes that anyone can make a “snow drawing.” Just tread a simple shape into the snow, again and again, until a spectacular pattern emerges. The geometry, he says, is the easy part. He has taught novices to trace out a Koch snowflake, an elaborate lacework of triangles, in as little as 10 minutes. But it takes a rare talent to stamp out the pattern for hours on end. One false turn can spoil a day’s work. “It takes quite a lot of concentration and care not to make a mistake at some point,” he says, “which of course cannot be undone.” We asked Beck to walk through some of his fanciest footwork to date.

A straightforward challenge 

“It was actually quite easy,” Beck says of this roughly 150-meter star he stamped across Lac Marlou, a frozen lake outside a ski resort in the French Alps. He created the work for Russian news channel RT, beginning with the station’s insignia in the central square. From there, he created the radiating points of the star and walked straight lines across the arms. A straight line is a deceptively simple challenge. Beck fixes his gaze on a distant marker and walks toward it. “It might just be a little bump in the snow, an ice crystal shining in the sunlight,” he says. If his attention wanders even for a moment, he risks shifting his gaze to the wrong marker and straying off course.


 http://ideas.ted.com/gallery-how-to-draw-snowflakes-the-size-of-soccer-fields/