A Sandbox With NO Cats!

by Shelly Kneupper Tucker on November 8, 2008

When y’all were little, did you ever go running to play in the sandbox only to discover a “present” the neighborhood cats left for you? Or, maybe worse that the fire ants had moved in and built a city overnight? Playing in the sandbox is great fun until you encounter such trials.

I love sand! It’s a great medium for art, too. In fact, back in May 2007 I gave y’all some links and videos in a post called “Dirty Links.”

I got thinking about sand after reading a post that Jamie at Duward Discussion recently wrote about sand paintings of the Navajo tribes in the Southwest. Then, I saw an article at Nicholas Patten’s work/life. He is one of the people I follow on Posterous, where I blog frequently on my Flotsam And Jetsam site.

You can play in a virtual sandbox and create a picture at thisissand.com which “is a website for play. It changes the pixels on the screen into digital sand that can be used as building material for cosmic landscapes, Clemens-style sand paintings, mandalas and so on.” It’s one of those interactive sites that gets me playing for hours. When you go over there, you will see a blank screen. I kept waiting for it to do something, then noticed a tiny box in the upper left. Click that for instructions to make your own virtual sand painting.

I saved the screen so you could see mine…but I hadn’t looked at the gallery before I began. If I had, I’d have either gotten much more creative or would have been too embarrassed to save mine to the gallery! Go see what people have been doing and while away some hours making your own painting. Let me know what you think.