Painted ships - sand sculpture

Sand sculpture is usually divided in to two types: Hard pack and Soft pack. As the names would suggest one is hard compacted sand and the other is sand just piled up loosely. Creatively they both have their weak and strong points and although hard packs are much more freeing in what can be done with them it is great every now and again to tame a big sand bank.

Ship to shore

I was working with Jamie Wardsley again from England at this project in Texel, Holland and we had to come up with a quick solution for a large soft pack wall. It was supposed to have something to do with the Dutch Galleon ships that explored for new islands to exploit.
We only had around two days to make it and the other side of the wall was already carved with someone else's design so we needed to be careful not to undermine that.
Knowing that it would have to be something simple and fast we looked at our options. The artistic director had provided us with some source material to get us started. Most of it was old paintings of battles at sea and we decided that that is what we would try to do. Make an old painting.

I saw two ships coming sailing in

This called for a new technique to be invented and so flattening out our canvas we set to work. Using sand with a lot of water we mixed up our monotone paint and using pallet knives, (Which is one of the main tools a sand sculptor has in their bag) we began to experiment with painting with sand.

Lifting some of the mud into the palm of my hand I was able to load up my knife and spread it on the surface like an impasto painting. The process was really quite satisfying. With each stroke building up form and texture.

I felt like Turner painting this epic naval scene. Although it was all the one colour there was enough light and shade to render the image quite vividly.

The rougher the better was what I was going for. Softening out the sand only to depict smoke from an exploded ship. I really enjoyed myself playing with the mud.

It was really quite fascinating the way that even though the whole thing looked very rough the eye filled in all the details necessary to make it into a nice feature on the project. The iconic shape of these ships made them stand out on the flat wall. I enjoyed working with Jamie as he was game for experimenting and has a good eye form the overall and not just the details.

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.