Being all caught up with work on Friday, I was able to spend the entire day at the beach with Ellen and her family. I decided it was time to do a large sand sculpture, the first of the summer (and perhaps the last). I marked out a roughly square area and dug around it to begin a mound. Not having any real inspiration, I decided to just go with a standard castle. Once the mound was begun and a platform packed down, I dug a round hole to reach water and really wet sand. Zach is standing in it here. Using double handfuls of this sand slurry I added further to the mound.

When the pile was large enough I started carving away, making a central manor with a tall tower, and an inner bailey wall with towers at each corner. The central tower was flat on top originally, but looked kind of bare, so I made the pyramid top separately and placed it on. In the background are two small towers Zach made.

Here’s the finished castle after about four hours of work. I added an outer bailey wall with four corner towers and two smaller ones at mid points. The one on the right is meant to be an entrance gate. Windows were added with small scoops, and I dug out the space between the outer bailey and the inner bailey, adding to the height of the latter. This was all I had time for. If I had another hour I might have tried adding crenellations to the walls and towers by making a smooth slab of wet sand and cutting tiny cubes from it. Maybe next time.

Another view looking landward. Late afternoon light always adds a bit of drama to the shapes and shadows.

Another shot featuring Zach’s two auxiliary towers. It was time to go home, so I filled in the large hole as much as I could to prevent walkers from stepping into it by accident, and left the castle to its fate. In about another hour the tide would reach it, and if that or destructive kids didn’t finish it off, the beach rakers would that night. It’s an ephemeral art, but one I enjoy.

When Ellen’s family is here they usually do a bit of sand sculpture at the beach, and I join in if I have time. I haven’t gotten to the beach much this year, but on Thursday I admired this tower by Zach and castle by Ann and Ellen.

The tide was coming in, but I just had time to add this Sea Serpent in front of the castles. Perhaps we’ll have time to do more today or tomorrow before they head home.

Wrapping up this year’s beach sculptures, first with two done a few weeks ago when Tim was here and we spent a few hours at the beach. I carved this star in a flattened patch of sand, it’s about six inches across, I think. Carving out is harder than it looks because you have to remove all the sand too.

That day Tim did this holed sphere looking somewhat like a cross between a wiffle ball and a bucky ball.

Back to recent times, we went to the beach Monday and found our big castle had survived the night pretty well, surprisingly. The beach raker had gone around it, and no one had really damaged the structure except for the lower skirt. Working nearby that day, many more people came by to admire our work, and Tim enjoyed telling them about it.

In this close view of the top area you can see that wind and some light rain have given it a weathered texture, but the details still show for the most part.

We each decided to do separate sculptures, then. Tim carved an old car from a single form of sand. Here he’s looking through one of his custom tool boxes.

The car is taking shape.

And here’s the final sculpture about to be hit by a wave.

Gabe worked on a small tower with two forms. Here he’s filling the upper one.

Carving a descending spiral.

And here’s the finished piece.

I decided to experiment with making arches using a method mentioned in the Sandcastles book: forming them over a pile of drier sand. Here I’ve made a pile and am cutting the sides down to form a hemisphere.

Next I formed a double arch with pancakes of wet sand over the hemisphere, and a small point at the top.

Here are the arches carved out. Next I would carefully dig out the inner hemisphere, hoping the arches would remain.

Failure! The arches collapsed before I finished removing the central dry sand. Not sure why, my guess is the arches were too thick and heavy, and/or the curve of the arch was too wide. I’ll have to try again some other time.

I had to go home and work after that, but Tim and Gabe stayed for the afternoon. Tim made a lighthouse out of a two-tiered form. Here the upper tier is being shaped.

And here’s the finished lighthouse looking quite good, and making a nice pair with our big castle in the background.

Finally, Gabe made this cryptic monolith from the remains of his tower after it toppled.

That’s it for beach carving this year I think, we’ll see what we come up with next summer!

This weekend my friend Tim and his son Gabe were visiting. We always go to the beach, weather permitting, and do some king of sand sculpture. Over the years Tim has continued to gather tools and knowledge about it, and we’ve all honed our skills, even though we don’t use them often. Sunday we spent the whole day working on a very large castle. Tim brought roofing paper (which is a kind of tar paper I think) to make forms with, and we filled a large form, then a smaller one on top of that, as above, with Gabe and I shoveling sand and carrying water while Tim stomped and packed the sand, keeping it all well soaked. The technique worked surprisingly well, and it’s one of the new ideas Tim found in this book:

which I recommend to anyone interested in sand sculpture. You can find a link to it below.

After the two forms were filled we built up a third layer by pancaking very wet sand in layers. The cylinder at the top here was from a bucket of wet sand, but that didn’t hold up and was removed.

The build up took about three hours, at which point the sun departed and clouds and wind moved in, but we escaped any rain. We spent the next three hours carving. The taller tower is mine, the other tower is Tim’s, and Gabe is working on lower shapes.

A better look at the whole structure, nearly as tall as us, and taller on the beach side. Gabe is adding sand bricks while Tim carves with one of his hand-made tools.

Later the forms were removed and carving continued down into the second level. The formed sand was very hard and great to carve, it worked quite well.

More carving down into the third level now. Tim’s various carving tools were used for the columns and structural shapes on the walls.

Here’s the third level mostly done, just needing finishing on the outer skirt and more details.

The completed castle as the clouds thickened around 6 PM. The round shapes were made with a large suction cup, another new technique we’ve just started using. Rotating the suction cup makes an easy spherical shape.

Here’s the north side with Gabe and I some 10-15 feet behind, making the castle look even larger than it actually was.

And the best view from the south side, showing how the opening Gabe started was expanded into a two-level interior view with columns by Tim, with stairs leading to it. The scale is mismatched in places, much smaller at the top for instance, but we still think it looked quite good! And many passers-by agreed. As the light faded and a storm moved in, we reluctantly left our creation behind and in the hands of fate, well satisfied with our day’s work, and quite tired and hungry, too!

Ellen’s sister Ann and other family members have been here all week, going to the beach whenever the uncertain weather permitted, and one of their activities is building sand castles and other things that defy description, like the one on the left! I believe that one is by Dave, Ann’s husband, while Ann and Ellen and Zach worked on the other.

Here’s another from a different day that I like even better, especially when surrounded by a real moat as it is here. I think this was also a group effort.

I made it to the beach one afternoon and created this twin-towered sculpture with an impossible-looking bridge between the two. There was a trick to that…I found a sturdy stick that I embedded in the middle.

Here’s a more dramatic shot. They always look bigger with the ocean in the background.

And if you should see this when you look up from your castling, you know it’s time to pack up and go home!

Ellen’s sister Ann and her family are visiting this week, and I’ve joined them at the beach for a few hours each afternoon (except for one rainy day). Tuesday they had this sand pile started, and I added a small tower to the top, all I could do with the shovel and my hands, as the other sand tools had been left home.

Today they built a bigger pile and were well on the way to a casual (unplanned) castle by the time I got there. I carved the top tower and this side of the pile…

…while nephew Zach made a smaller drip castle on the outer wall, which we decided was the guard house.

The tide was coming in, and though the castle crew of Ellen, Zach and Ann worked hard, it was a losing battle, with pieces caving in and falling from the ocean side.

Here’s the last shot of the castle before most of it collapsed into the water.

We did go to the beach again Sunday, and while it began with cloudy weather and a light shower, it cleared later and warmed to a fine beach day. Tim, Gabe and I were sand sculpting, of course. Tim wanted to try his spiral pyramid again, but smaller, while I decided to carve a spaceship. Not a realistic one, but the kind seen on science fiction magazines in the 1950s. I began with a tall tower created with the pancake method, stacks of very wet sand pancakes, then started carving it away.

My original plan was a two-stage rocket, and here’s the top stage essentially finished, with the bottom stage carving well underway.

Tim’s spiral went better in the smaller size, and he finished the surfaces with plastering tools.

Unfortunately the top stage of the spaceship collapsed, and I had to remove it and rebuild the top part with more pancakes. When I recarved it, I abandoned the upper stage and just made a single streamlined rocket shape, then added large fins on two sides by making smaller pancake towers and carving those away. Meanwhile, Gabe was making an elaborate gate, tying things together.

The fins came out well, and then I added a door and entrance ramp, with a gangplank made of plastic. Behind is Tim’s finished spiral with a large sand ball by Gabe. I think it looks better this time, in a complete pyramid shape.

Here’s the finished site, which we decided was a futuristic spaceport. Tim added his Teletubby figure, which seems to fit right in. Would have been fun to add more buildings, but this is what we had time for, and we were happy with it.

My friend Tim and his son Gabe are here for the weekend, and as usual, we went to the beach to construct something out of sand, among other things like swimming. Tim always arrives with interesting ideas, and this year it was for a large pyramid with a spiral path to the top. We began by making the sand pile.

Here’s the finished pile, packed down and sprinkled with water to keep it solid and moist. Now, I would have simply cut the spiral path out of this, but Tim had other ideas.

Using rectangular sections of a plastic sign advertising the soundtrack to the film “Titanic,” which he’d found being discarded at a mall, Tim and I pushed them down into the sand pyramid following the spiral path guide he drew, attaching the sections with clothespins.

Then we filled in the resulting forms with more sand and sprinkled water to create the spiral path. Ellen and Gabe helped, it was a long process, but it worked well.

As we went along, the forms were removed from the upper levels and added to the lower ones. Here Tim packs and shapes while Ellen fills.

Unfortunately we ran out of time to finish the entire pyramid shape, so Tim made a giant stairway and trimmed off the lower sections, creating what we called a ziggurat (perhaps not accurate, but it describes raised platforms for worship, which kind of fits). Gabe made a large sand ball to decorate the top.

I think it looks particularly nice from above with late afternoon shadows. We might go to the beach and do something else today, though the weather has turned cooler and cloudy, so we’ll decide later. Meanwhile, this was an excellent day there.