For The Holidays!
Build a friendly snowman for a family photo to grace your relitives with holiday greetings.
Building a snowman out of sand is both easier and harder than you might think; what it comes down to is scale. Size does matter!
Build a Sandy Snowman The Easy way - Using South Texas Snowballs
If you have never made Texas Snowballs before you will find Sandy Feet's book Sandcastles Made Simple to be of invaluable assistance.... but you can get the readers digest version of making them from here.
Advantages: Requires hardly any equipment, very little sand, skill, experience or artistic talent. Heck -- you don't even have to be on a beach.
Disadvantages: If you are not a Photoshop wizard -- or on good terms with one -- the people are going to make your efforts look puny indeed.
What you need:
- a bucket of GOOD sand*
- a bucket of water
- a selection of miniature decorative elements - natural or otherwise - for facial and clothing features
- photoshop (or similar photo manipulation application)
Step 1 Using the sand & water, make 3 South Texas Snowballs sized big, bigger and biggest.
Step 2 Gently position the three balls on top of one another
Step 3 Decorate in traditional (or not!) snowman fashion
-i.e. shells for eyes and/or buttons; twigs for arms; seaweed for hair, etc.
Step 4 Shoot three photos: 1.)a closeup of the snowman, 2.)a group shot of your family and 3.)a generic beach photo - (here's one of those you can use, complete with scale-clarifying seagulls -- royalty free)
Step 5 Use photoshop (or similar application) to enlarge the sandman and merge the photos. Make that sucker as big as you like!
Bonus Tip
Snowmen are very rarely if ever created from perfectly round snowballs. Your miniature sandman will read better if your balls are sloppy and lopsided.
Build "Toasty the Snowman" for a family photo to grace your holiday greetings.
Perhaps your photoshop skills are rusty or non-existent or maybe you just feel up to the challenge of building something bigger. If you have never used forms before you will find Sandy feet's book Sandcastle Made Simple to be of invaluable assistance.... but you can get the readers digest version of working with forms here.
Advantages: If you do this right, you will have a stunning holiday photo of your family -- no photoshop experience necessary!
Disadvantages: It is not as easy as I make it look.
What you need:
- GOOD sand*
- Buckets and buckets of water
- Forms - Radforms will work but SoBstackers work better
- Sandcarving tools
- a selection of decorative elements - natural or otherwise - for facial and clothing features
Step One Use the forms to create a very large mass of compacted sand
Step Two Carve away everything that doesn't look like a snowman
Step Three Decorate with shells, a carrot, bits of coal, palm fronds, a scarf
Step Four Pose and photograph!
Bonus Tip
The undercut that defines the roundness of the snowball is the essential cut that will make the sculpture read "snowman." It is also the most dangerous cut you can make. If your sand is lacking in natural silt or clay; if you didn't use enough water or compact the sand into the forms with enough enthusiasm; if you cut too deeply or if gravity is especially strong that day, your snowguy can quickly devolve into a messy pile of disorganized sand.
You can minimize the risk of causing your snowman's early demise and still get the right shape by using an old sculptor trick: clothing! Check out the photo of "Toasty" the Sandman. See how my partner and I craftily disguised the fact that we were too scared to undercut all the way around by outfitting him with a scarf and vest? And see how we undercut deeply wherever the vest wasn't to suggest roundness? The vest provides support and the deep cuts behind the vest flaps put shadows in the right places.
* if you are not fortunate enough to have GOOD sand to work with, there are ways to improve the sand you have. Sandy feet's book - Sandcastles Made Simple - goes into a lot of detail on this very subject!
Information from: http://www.sandcastlecentral.com/tips/snowman.html