LED lighting is showing up more and more. It’s appealing for a variety of reasons: decent light output, small size, safety, and low power requirements. As costs continue to come down, I expect usage to keep increasing. I added an entry a while back about one way to use colored LED lights for your sculptures. Those lights were only available if you ordered them online and then you had to do some small modifications. The photo above, though, shows LED lights that you can often buy locally, which is useful if you need them NOW.

    I got the light with the flexible armature at Lowe’s Home Improvement for about $25 (batteries included). That’s not particularly cheap, but the flexible arm allows you to direct the light just about anywhere you need. The light is bright enough for most sculptures (could be a little brighter though) and I found it in the outdoor grill accessories section. It’s designed to clamp to your grill and help you see your steaks. The other, smaller lights (in the middle, and the box is shown as well) from Bell were cheaper (somewhere around $10?) and I got them at Walmart in the auto parts section. But these lights were not as bright and I could have bought another pair to make the lighting more satisfactory. The cost of batteries has to be added to the cost of the lights, so this isn’t an effort to find the cheapest lighting solution. But the cost isn’t bad and these sort of lights can be just what you need for some situations.

    One nice feature of these lights is that you won’t electrocute yourself or guests if water meets electricity. However, it’s possible that water can wipe out the lights and the cold can freeze the batteries. So try to keep them off the ice and out of the cold meltwater.

    Even if you typically use wired lighting to light your sculptures, it’s not a bad idea to have a battery operated LED light available as a backup. I’ve been to lots of events where the sculpture was placed in the middle of the room and the nearest outlet was a long way away. Sometimes, the client will opt to go without a light instead of taping a cord to the floor. In that case, the sculpture usually doesn’t work as well because it’s less visible.

    Certainly, these aren’t your only options for LED lighting. But I like options that are readily available when I need them, in case an unexpected situation or a last minute job shows up.

The following comment was on the original blog entry. After some technical difficulties, the blog had to be reconstructed, and this was the only way to keep the original comments.

Anonymous

Is this the best lighting to get for a two-block buffet sculpture.  What do you use that is always shown @ Alaska and other places that make the sculpture look totally green etc. ?  Do you just put color strips in the led lights?  Thanks for the tips.

Paul

Wednesday, March 5, 2008 - 02:22 AM

    I never answered the comment above (I’m not sure why), so I will now (7/21/08). It’s hard to say if this is “the best lighting to get for a two-block buffet sculpture” because every lighting situation is different. Ambient light washes out sculpture lighting, so if it’s very bright in the area around the sculpture, you probably wouldn’t be able to properly color a sculpture with light no matter how much lighting you used. On the other hand, in a darker setting, you can get very rich colors with not much lighting.

    Lighting is a very important part of setting up a sculpture and you need to be prepared to properly light the piece. This means getting enough light to travel through the entire sculpture so that it shows off the work and makes it a prominent decoration in the room. Lighting helps give ice the “wow” factor that it’s there for. Sometimes one LED light by itself does not produce enough light for even a single block sculpture, so you may have to use more than one. A fluorescent strip light is usually enough, but you have to be able to plug it in. With LED’s you have to worry about the batteries; are the batteries fresh enough to last the whole event? If the batteries get cold, they won’t last as long. You’re trying to find the best way to light a sculpture given the setting that the sculpture will be in. And you’re also trying to minimize your costs. LEDs are finally at a price point where they offer a viable alternative to fluorescent and halogen lighting, but you still need to make sure that they’ll work for your particular situation.

    Regarding the sculptures in Alaska, they use multiple powerful utility lights (I think they’re halogens) with gel overlays. The hot lighting is not much of a concern given the size of the sculptures and the temperatures there. Keep in mind that when you see a photo of an ice sculpture, the sculpture may not have looked exactly that way to the naked eye. It would have been close, but by using longer exposures, you can make some coloring stronger, like “totally green” for example.

    Finally, LED lights come in variety of colors (not the one in the article above, however) so you generally don’t need gels, you just need to pick the right color and use enough lights. Some LEDs will even change color, going through a slow cycle that repeats. Fluorescent lights, on the other hand, are usually just white (although I’ve seen colored fluorescents lately too) so you need to use gels for coloring.