Great potato, good times: Idaho is building a better Big Potato

Sharolyn Schofield has to get the color of a potato just right. It’s no easy thing. You can’t go to the paint counter at the hardware store and say, “Give me five gallons of potato.” Paint scanners can’t match the color of a potato skin. So Sharolyn blends brown and yellow and black and white and red, and her final coats lighten and shade the Big Idaho Potato to burbank russet verisimilitude. And it does look lifelike… “That’s our job,” says Sharolyn, “to make it look as real as possible.” To say that Sharolyn and her husband Chris Schofield are the world’s top big potato experts is no overstatement. They have built two for the New Year’s Idaho Potato Drop and now two for the Potato Commission. The latest – a four-ton potato – will begin touring the nation Saturday, the star of the Potato Commission’s multi-million dollar promotion effort that will take it to 70 events this year. Since fall, Idaho’s new Big Idaho Potato has been Schofield Designs’ full-time job. The Weiser artists/fabricators have put their other custom art work aside for the new and improved potato. Read more