Sand

What can you do with sand? Other than building the fréquemment observées sandcastles (sorry if this french is wrong), throwing in at your annoying little bother when you are young, or digging a hole in it on the beach to find the fascinating little miniature crabs and clams.

Well... this is not that commonly seen, but sand animation is one of the most amazing animations I have seen.

The first time I had seen this form of animation was on a Taiwanese show, where they invited this artist to perform. By only using his hands and sand, he created an amazing peice of art.

So, when Mrs Tan told us that some instructors are coming over to Nanyang to teach us sand animation for our sabbaticals, I was exploding with longing. And there you go, from the 20th to today, the 25th, I had been having sand animation courses in the art room.

The first day, Allen (if I remembered and spelled his name correctly) taught us some basic techniques on drawing on sand, and then we were left on our own to do storyboarding and music and of course, perfect our drawings for the rest of the sabbactical. Oh, the theme was 'celerberation', and it is suppose to be for our school's 95th anniversary (I know, it's sad, the theme is so cliche, but well, we had fun...)

Drawing the same thing over and over again was...of course very boring, especially after everyone in my group had already known what to do for every scene, so we had the time to ourselves to draw random stuff, and I was so happy, finding myself really addicted to the smooth textured particles and the feeling of them sliding out from my hand. I was definitely in love. With the sand. Though I did found myself not really liking the performing part, where we are to morf subject matters into something else, but I am quite fine (more than fine actually) with just drawing a picture, giving myself time to perfect it, find a nice lighting and take a picture, and then 'sweep', off to the drain it goes (this is the saddest part about sand animation, it can't be kept).

Indeed, the time was not wasted, I made some really nice drawings, and I am quite satisfied with them, of course, some improvements could have been made, but well...at my standard, forgive me. Here are some of them on my first day (all done by our group):

This is just a practice drawing, I did the eyes and the heart and a bit of hair^^

Learning how to morf one object to another, this was the second scene actually, the first was a seedling, morfed into the tree.

And this is the third scene, it quite obvious that the control tower was morfed from the tree><

 So that's for the first day, I'll upload the rest when my friend give me the photos. These are really not very good drawings, especially the last two, the first one has to much sand too, it's so messy, oh well...it is our first try.

OHOH, Mrs Tan suggested for me to do this for my coursework next year, considering on how I liked it so much and is, according to some instructors, not bad. I might consider it as a choice, I mean, obviously I won't be doing a painting, unless I want to fail. She also mentioned that she want want to buy some sand boxes for our art room!! I am totally supporting this idea, since Allen told us that custom-made sand boxes with expensive price tags of more than a thousand bucks. (you can make one yourself though)

However,  some more instrucors came in today, and I realised that I really suck, my drawings are not too bad, the end product is still presentable, but there's a lack of skills, I uses my fingers too much, when I should have used my palm. I want to learn!! I want to persuade my mum to let me go for the courses (if I can find one and persuade enouh people to go with me), but I doubt she'll let me go....

Anyway, according to Mrs Tan, nothing is easy and nothing is hard~ I shall end here today.

...I miss the sand...just saying...