You Have to Have Good "Raw Materials:" a Trip to the Beach!

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There's a lot more to painting mandalas on stones than just picking up some random stones and dropping paint on them. You probably have figured that out by now!

Very flat, pleasantly shaped and extremely smooth beach stones are much harder to find than most people imagine.

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Yours truly, on the beach on Washington's Pacific coast

When you go to your average beach, most stones you see tend to be very irregularly shaped — the result of being slammed against other rocks by the surf, typically over a period of hundreds or thousands of years.

When you do find stones with regular rounded shapes, they tend to be truly round, and often have pretty scarred and rough surfaces.

When you do find a flat stone or too, they are often rough around the edges and the stone surface has lots of tiny cracks and fissures that simply don't work for detailed painting — the liquid paint finds every tiny crack and in no time your nicely defined lines become "feathered" and fuzzy.

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THIS kind of beach offers far more possibilities!

The net result is that I can sometimes spend as much as 2-3 searching, in order to find just a half-dozen suitable stones.

Over the years, I have found only a couple of beach locations that have relatively many stones of the type I prefer for painting.

Both of these are less than a mile-long stretches of beach where the predominant type of stone is basalt that seems to cleave off the base coastal rock in thin sheets, breaks into pieces and then slowly erode down to thin and extremely smooth stones, generally between 1" (25mm) up to maybe 4" (100mm) in diameter.

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Part of our "harvest"

They get their smoothness because they come from Pacific Coast deep water beaches with extremely rough surf, but will wash up on small sandy coves... and the sand basically works as a polishing agent during stormy weather.

Maybe I make life harder for myself than I need to by being a "purist" in the sense that I will only paint on beach stones as I find them; I never use rock tumblers and polishing equipment... it somehow takes away from the idea that these are nature's treasures.

Anyway, we took a day trip to one of our favorite beaches, a couple of days ago!

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After we get home, the rocks get washed to remove dried salt, sand and seaweed. The back of our truck offers an excellent "table!"

Although we live on the coast, it's about a 2 1/2 hour drive (each way) to the "real" Pacific Ocean coast, so we have to be up-and-at-it at 6:00am... pack and lunch, leave by 8:00 and be at the beach by 10:30am.

Typically, we have energy enough to put in about a 6-7 hour day (with a lunch break!) of crawling around on our hands and knees.

A good haul will bring several hundred usable stones... as compared to a handful locally, and that means I will have high quality "raw materials" to last me for about a year, maybe more!

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A rare (and unexpected) piece of BC Nephrite Jade

Occasionally, we find unexpected trasures, in the form of raw agates or even super rare pieces of surf tumbled nephrite jade that have washed down from Canada.

The piece above — about 2 1/2" in diameter — was "worth" the trip, alone!

Aside from that, it's a pleasant enough drive through beautiful scenery, and the Pacific Coast beach is spectacular!

Thanks for stopping by!

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Because I am trying to make some semblance of income — a part time living, even — I now add this footer to all my posts, in the hope that someone, somewhere, might decide to take a further look at my work, and perhaps consider supporting independent art.

Thank you, in advance, for your consideration and support!

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Regardless, your upvotes and comments are always appreciated!

Thank you for supporting independent art!

2021.09.04 AS-TXT-061/027



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