These Sand Sculptures of Animals Are Amazingly Realistic
Andoni Bastarrika’s virtuosic sand sculptures capture the power and freedom of his animal subjects
Andoni Bastarrika is an artist from the Basque region of Spain who specializes in turning wet beach sand into sculptures of animals so realistic that they look as if they’ve just crawled out of the sea. Although Bastarrika doesn’t limit his creations to animals (in fact, making a sand mermaid for his daughters was what set him on this particular path more than a decade ago), he takes particular inspiration from the freedom and power that animals symbolize for him.
In order to create his intricate sculptures, Bastarrika amasses large piles of wet sand and shapes them with his hands before contouring them with a sharpened stick and occasionally adding pigment and other features from found objects like glass, or ashes and clay powder. Depending on the scale of the project, each animal can take up to two days of work to sculpt.
