November Entry - Fort Waialua

[mearrin69]

And so castles made of sand melts into the sea, eventually.

Well, this isn't *exactly* what he was talking about but...near the end of my fifth grade year my family moved to Hawaii. We lived in a town called Waialua on the north shore of Oahu, across the road from the beach (these days that same beach is filled with condos). I made some friends there and ended up spending the entire summer, pretty much, on the beach. I got pretty good at making sand castles - and sand alligators, and mermaids, and a bunch of other stuff.

You could walk out into the sea several hundred feet, half-a-mile in some places, to the breakers but the shallowness didn't stop the tide from coming in. At high-tide, most of the beach across from our apartment was covered over, or at least occasionally smashed by waves. That made the lifespan of my castles much too brief for my tastes.

Like the Chinese trying to keep out the hordes, I started building walls around my creations. I started small and kept going. Eventually I had my brother's e-tool (entrenching tool, a metal folding shovel issued to US soldiers - my brother was in the Army) out there and was making walls several feet high.

Of course, nothing seemed to work. Every morning I'd go out to the beach and start again...because even massive piles of sand only slowed the inevitable. Oh. BTW. That was the best year of my life. Eventually we moved to Schofield Barracks and then back CONUS (continental US). So...castles made of sand...

This challenge got me thinking about that and, though I was sorely tempted to maybe come up with something post-apocalyptic (Miller's Leibowitzian abbey from A Canticle for Leibowitz came briefly to mind), I decided I might try something a bit different.

Here's my first take. Call it a proof of concept. It's done with layer styles...which I don't think will work very well for generating something final and I'm starting to feel cheap for using in any case. So, anyway, we'll see what happens. Oh, I should note that this is the "before" state of Fort Waialua. The "after" state will look much worse. I might include both states in the final...though I think that challenge is already past...
M

[edit]Question for the PS gurus: I have three layers here with a drop shadow and bevel/emboss layer style on them. Why are the lower layers sort of ghosted out? There's not any pixels in the layer above them so I'm not sure I understand why that's happening. Is there a way to make that not happen? It actually looks kind of cool as an atmospheric effect...but I don't much like it at sand castle scale.

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