How to make sand sculpture of dolphin

Hello, my name is Jamie from Sand in Your Eye and today we're going to make a sand dolphin made from just sand and water. The sand that we've got here is just like beach sand so anything you can hear you can feel the beach. So the tools you may need is a shovel to dig your sand with, you may need a bucket to collect all your water with, a wooden floor to carve with, a wooden spatula to do some sculpting and also maybe a lollipop stick just to do your detailing as well. If on a beach you need to have damp sand, now you can do that by getting the sand below the high tide mark, you can get water from the sea using your buckets or you can even dig a hole. If your sand is dry you can mix in some water. So firstly you make a rough shape of the dolphin, you get the sand and you push it together with your hands. So when we're making a sand sculpture we have to work top down, so in this case we're going to make a dolphin first. The reason is if we make a pretty little eye like so then when you're carving all of the sand that you do on the top is going to fall off. So to make a dolphin we have to make mud patterns or hand stacking and to do this we're going to get a load of sand and we're going to put it into the bucket of water and fill it up and the water needs to be above the sand. So to make a hand stack we're going to take a load of really wet sand, support it with one hand and then pat it with the other. Now it's really important to stop patting once the sand is set else if we keep patting it actually just breaks it. Gradually stack up your mud pies in the shape of and a little bit bigger than the dolphin. Then use a wooden spatula to cut your fin shape on the front and then the back and then cut off the sides. So if there's one thing with sculpture that I can tell you is when you are doing your cut always cut into the body of the sculpture. So I'm trimming the dorsal fin off this way because if you cut the other way then this is what happens. Why did I do that? Now I'm going to have to start all over again. Then we'll sketch a centre line and then cut it off so it's nice and tapered and streamlined whilst keeping the dorsal fin a little bit thick so it's nice and straight. So once you've done we're ready to go back to our body. So we're going to smooth out like so and then we're going to draw a centre line all the way down and then basically cut the sand away from the centre line and then this is going to make the dolphin symmetrical. So here we have the dorsal fin and the main body of the dolphin and this may be enough and you could even make even more and make a pod of dolphins or you can go a little bit further and make some flippers, the tail and the beak. When you're ready to do your fin smooth it off a wooden float and then draw it and cut it out in a wooden spatula. Undercuts are great to get that dark shadow onto the sculpture. Then do the same for a tail and for the beak you may want to hand stack again, place it centrally and carve it out with your ruler and then add an eye. That is how we make a sand dolphin.