This first piece is simply an arch that I attempted to carve bricks into. The bricks ended up being a bit large, I should have made the mortar lines closer together.
Here I am at Emerald Lake, working on a tower sculpture. There wasn't a lot of beach at Emerald Lake this year, since the lake was so high, and this made the remaining beach hard to use. The sand on the beach never dried out, so any sculptures didn't dry at the proper rate, and I had to bide my time. Notice that the sand all around me is very dark, it's so wet.
This is the end result of the tower sculpture. I like the look of boulders up the side of a mountain - it's a lot more interesting than leaving it unfinished.
This next tower was made at Mistusinne, SK. The sand on the beach there was slightly more coarse, as you can tell from the texture of the tower. However, there was a high clay content to this sand, which made it very sticky, and easy to create the winding stairs that put out from the mountain side.
Here is my attempt at creating a suspension bridge. Notice the tiny piece of support that is still left under the middle of the bridge... I took the photo before that support was removed, suspecting that the bridge might fall down. Shortly after taking this photo, I asked my oldest daughter to remove the support piece, and one whole side of the bridge ceremoniously collapsed! She was surprised and sad to see this happen, but I was just laughing, and apologized for not preparing her for the inevitable.
These last two pictures show two different angles of the same piece. The whole point with this castle was to show a "double arch"... that is, an arch that is connected in mid-air only to another arch.
This castle was a hit with my daughters and their new friends, since the arches were high enough for a toy tow-truck to drive underneath. They built a whole city around the castle, with roads coming and going.
