board games - sand sculpture

It is a fun after-dinner pastime to take out a board game and have a play with my son and wife. As a tool for getting our son to unwind before bed, it is really quite handy. Watching Tv is too exciting and getting him to be creative leads to a postponed bedtime as he simply must finish his masterpiece.

I like board games as much as the next person the rules are laid out clearly and most have a strong element of chance so that at some time or other, everyone can be a winner.

With our son, we try not to make it easy on him, we know that the acceptance of losing is a great skill to have. You're looking at a pro right here! I do, however, try to bring him down a notch cause is so damn good. Once he has the rules he will do what he can to become triumphal. He must get his competitive streek from his mother because it sure ain't coming me.

Bored games

When asked to make a sculpture for the 2015 Westen Supermare sand sculpture festival in England about then I was faced with the problem that they are all kind of flat, some would say board like. The compaction I was presented with was tall and blocky so, I knew I would have to take them to another dimension.

I actually don't have much to say about this sculpture because the brief I was given was just to make a collage of them so that people could see what they were. For me, this kind of sculpture can be very boring. If I had to just make one game it would have been ok, I could have explored the deep and meaningful essence of what the game actually meant to me but for this project, creativity was cock blocked.

Fun and games until someone loses an A

The overall theme of the project was Games and I will be the first to admit it was not the most interesting to work on. Although, I tried to make it interesting for myself by playing with an unusual perspective.

To keep the height of the sculpture I tilted the chessboard so it would look like you had a birds-eye view. This turned out to be quite difficult with the beach sand. Where my sculpture was placed also meant that I had only two angles to view from, which constrained what I could do.
I included Chess, (as I said). Snakes and ladders, Trivial Pursuit and Scrabble. not much more to say really. I added some Lego blocks and a Domino to the right to fill some space and join the with the next scene.

Even you can win

Full upvote to the first person who can work out the scrabble word.

alt

Ps

Thanks for reading. I use PeakD to document my work as an ephemeral Sculptor of sand, snow and ice, amongst other things. This will hopefully give it a new life on the Hive Blockchain. Below you will find some of my recent posts.