Dan's Tips, Tools, and Techniques for Sand Sculpting

Hi, this is Dan Dobley from Sanding Ovations. We're going to give you some tips now on how we actually do this stuff and what the tools look like and some techniques on how we carve sand. First of all, the most important tool is the shovel. Whether it be square or round nose, I prefer the square nose because it's easy to carve with and of course this is easy for digging in the ground with the spade. Now the most important thing with sand sculpting is water. Water, water, water. Water is the glue that holds sand together. Without water this is sand. With water it stays together, it stays together. So I'm going to show you a couple of things. This is a dry pile of sand here and this is what I did from a bottomless bucket. I put the bucket down, put wet sand in there, take the bucket off and it gives me this little pedestal to work with. Another thing you can do is what's called wet pack. You add sand and water together and you can patty cake this stuff up to get yourself some elevation here. Say you want to build a castle. We'll get this built up, let it set for a few minutes and I'll show you some tools here. All right, now for the bigger sections you might want to get yourself a trowel, a regular old concrete trowel. It's good for packing, it's good for cutting surfaces and of course you incrementally go down on your tool size to say a two inch margin trowel. That gets into different areas like so, so, so. I prefer a fillet knife because you can do just about everything with a fillet knife than you can do with any other tool, any other tool. All righty, it's very quick, very easy but keep in mind that without water you're not going to be doing any of this. You go down inside to a smaller margin trowel. This is a cake decorating knife, a frosting knife. I cut the round off, made it square and there's really no sand sculpting tool store. It's kind of whatever you're comfortable with and I like everything with an offset handle so your knuckles aren't in the sand when you're carving it, makes sense. So like say you wanted to make some stairs, you'd start at the top, work your way down, always pointing towards the center. You know this is, this is something you're going to have to learn just by, just by doing it but the biggest key I can tell you about sand sculpting is to use water, lots of water because if you don't use water you have dry sand and there's nothing you can do with it. It won't stay together whereas wet sand, the water is the glue and sand that, that makes it stick together. So if you want to go down to the beach take yourself a bucket for water, get yourself a another bucket and cut the bottom out of it and to bring yourself a third bucket that you can make your wet pack and that's where you mix the sand in the water and do the funny little things that you might want to do. So very simple, very easy for about 10 to 20 dollars you can get yourself a set of tools and at the end I like a little brush because it makes everything all smooth, smooth and pretty. So if you got this much stuff you got about 20 bucks or less you can go to the beach and have yourself a fun afternoon.