Sand Castle Weekend at Atlantis!

The Instructors: Lucinda "sandy feet" Wierenga and Fred Mallett are members of the "Sons of the Beach Sand Castle Wizards" of South Padre Island, TX. We are a team of professional sand sculptors who travel all around the world doing demonstrations and teaching people how to have more fun at the beach. We have published two books on the subject, and developed our own line of specialty sand carving tools. We also maintain a web-site at www.sandcastlecentral.com that is packed with sand sculpture tips and tricks, contest information and links to other sand sculpture sites.

This was a return visit to Atlantis for us; we were here last March to build sand sculptures for four broadcasts of LIVE with Regis and Kelly.

The Demonstration: Over the course of the holiday weekend, we worked on a large demonstration sand sculpture - see photos here.

The Workshops: Over the weekend, we conducted a series of sand sculpting workshops geared for everyone - 'kids" of all ages and levels of ability. Each workshop ran approximately 30 - 50 minutes with hands-on practice and assistance offered at the end of the session. All supplies and tools were provided.

*Sand Stacking 101 - This workshop focused on simple hand-stacking techniques that are guaranteed to make every participant a better sand castle builder. Students learned how to stack towers, walls and free-standing arches as well as some basic carving techniques using common tools

*Sand Stacking 201 - In this session we breezed back over the hand-stacking techniques covered in the morning session, with a greater emphasis on building BIG structures and detailing more advanced carving techniques.

*Introduction to Forms - Packing sand is an alternative way of getting sand to stand, and in this session we showed how to 1.) get the most use out of the moulds commonly included in kids' beach toy kits; 2.) use "casting tubes" made from casino cups with the bottoms cut out and 3.) build and use a set of professional-style forms from common roofing paper - known in the sand sculpture world as "Rad Forms"

*Advanced Carving Techniques - In this final workshop we offered detailed instruction on carving large objects, including face and figure carving as well as architecture.

sandy feet's face-carving lesson

"Hands-On" Assistance from Fred

Sand sculpting - not just for kids!

Fun was had by all