Sandcastles me arse - Sand sculpture

I hate sandcastles! There, I said it. It is probably strange coming from someone who works a lot with sand but I really don't see the point of them. Why in Gods name did they become a thing? Who was the first one to sit on a beach and decide that making a castle from sand would be a good idea? Hear me out. There is a world of possibilities when it comes to sand. It can be fashioned into nearly any form, the sky is the limit and yet the favourite past time is to make a medieval castle which will never look as interesting as the work put into it should justify. To be honest, they are just the most difficult things to make look good in sand. and even with all my years of working in this material mine still look crap. Maybe it is my inadequacy or I'm missing something fulfilling about them but, they just leave me cold. Sorry to all the budding sand architects out there of all ages but they are just not my cup of tea.

Every now and again I will be asked to make one and I cringe. I try to convince the asker to let me do something else, anything else but, invariably they get their way. It's like asking a musician to make some elevator music. I'll do it but I know neither I, nor the client will be entirely happy.

With all that rant said I do know of some amazing sandcastle builders but they are the ones who bring life to the genre where the castle is a backdrop to a bigger concept and they are anally retentive enough to pull it all off.

Building your castles on sand

This is one I had to make for a photoshoot. It is an embarrassment for me to even show it but when I started this blog I vowed to document every sand project that ever I did and although it may be painful at times for me and my audience I am going to do it. What follows may seem like excuses to how I ended up with this but it is the story and I'm sticking by it.

I started building as the sun started to rise, I knew I wanted to make the best sandcastle ever and wanted to give myself around 6 hours before the photoshoot was to happen. All was going really well, I had several turrets, an internal city and draw bridge crossing a moot, all the bells and whistles. This was perched on top of a mountain that stood over a meter and a half tall. I was actually quite proud of it and as the photographers and models arrived for the shoot I just had to remove the last Form* from the bottom and carve the mountain to the ground. The client was happy and I was fawned over by the models. This was twenty minutes before my deadline. So I removed the last form and of course, the whole sculpture collapsed into a pile of dust. All my morning work dissolved to a pile of embarrassment. Bollox ! (The Irish word for these situations). Of course, I have no photos to show how it looked, You'll just have to take my word for it that it looked pretty cool.

With the twenty minutes left I tried as best I could to recarve the sand I had left into this monstrosity. I really hate sandcastles.

*Sand Forms are like cake tins that you compact the sand into to give you a big, more solid block to carve from.

Saving grace

Luckily the models were pretty enough to salvage the photoshoot and even on the dreary Irish summers day, the shoot went well.