For 20 years, Jamie Louks has been sculpting everything from cake to sand for the past 20 years. Owner of Sugarnova, she’s known for combining realism and fantasy in her cake, sugar, and chocolate sculptures.
But Jamie’s prowess extends beyond edible creations: she has been sculpting sand since 2023. From a scaled Mt. Rushmore to a towering pirate ship, her jaw-dropping works of sand have been showcased across the globe. Now, for the world soccer competition, Jamie has been commissioned to create a custom sculpture in Seattle.
Jamie will be working on the sculpture from July 1st through July 8th at the Artists at Play Plaza at Seattle Center, behind the Museum of Pop Art. She generously took the time to talk to Washington Rock about the project and our Ultrafine Sand.
What kind of sand sculpture did Seattle Center ask you to create?
Seattle Center was interested in having an international feel. So I’m going to have waves of flags from all over the world—the different nations competing—and a big whale tale representing the Pacific Northwest.
And of course it says “Let’s Play Sea”. It’s all about the representation of the whole international audience and the whole world.
How do you translate a 2D concept sketch into a 3D sculpture?
I already have an idea in my mind of how far back I want certain parts of the sculpture to go, and I know that I want either side of it to really bend backwards and act more like waves.
So while the drawing itself is really flat, I’ve got the idea of waves in mind. I want the flags to feel more like water, and I don’t want them to just be a flat surface. I’m visualizing what I want it to be as I’m working.
What is the process for creating a sand sculpture?
After the sand is delivered, we have to create forms. We load each with one layer of sand at a time, add a little bit of water if necessary, and then compact it together. We go layer by layer by layer until every form is filled all the way to the top.
Then I carve top-down like a printer. As I finish, that’s when I can start removing forms.
How would you describe your artistic style?
I would say my own style is usually kind of whimsical. I want people to look at it and have fun and feel happy. I want it to be something that people are wowed by the whole size of it, the grandeur of it is impressive.
What is it about sculpture that you’re drawn to over other art forms?
My brain wants to work in 3D. It wants to build things. It wants to get messy and dig into something or build something out.
When I was in the pastry world and sculpting cakes, I was building things. I was sculpting something and doing what I would call additive sculpture: adding frosting to it, adding chocolate to it.
When I got into things like pumpkin carving and sand, I started doing subtractive sculpture, which is a whole different way of thinking about things. But it’s how my brain likes to think.
How did your experience with cake and pastry sculpting prepare you for sand sculpting?
I’m so used to building and working with something fragile and squishy, cake and frosting. You smear it around and you cut it apart. Then I got to sand, and I was like, “Oh yeah, I can squish it. I can add water to it. I can smear it. I can cut it. I can do all the same things.”
It just didn’t feel crazy out-of-my-wheelhouse to jump into it and work with it.
When did you start working with sand?
It was kind of a crazy chain of events that led me to sand because it’s not the easiest industry to break into. I always wanted to compete on television in baking and pastry. I wanted to do big, crazy cakes on television. So for 10 years I was interviewing to get onto a television competition. Finally, after a couple of them, I got onto Halloween Wars.
The second that I got into pumpkin carving, I just knew that I had met my people. I met ice carvers, snow carvers, and sand sculptors. From there, it just snowballed and yeah, the rest is history.
My first pumpkin-carving teammate on Halloween Wars, Willy Tuz, was also a sand sculptor. I was fascinated to learn that, because I’d never met one before, and he was an art director for sand-sculpting projects.
So I said, “If you ever bring on new people for projects, let me know.”
Willy invited me to this massive sand project where the first thing that I was carving alongside another sand carver was a 10-foot wall. It was a 12-day project in Germany, and he basically told me, “This will either be 12 days of hell, or you’ll be addicted to it. So good luck.”
It was a very sink-or-swim situation.
It must have been an exploratory, sensory experience carving sand for the first time.
Yeah. I was getting to know the texture of the sand. I was getting to know the physics of it in a lot of ways—and how does it stick to itself? How far can you push it before it wants to collapse or break?
Just like painters are particular about the kind of paint they use, are sculptors particular about the kind of sand they use?
Absolutely. Sand carvers, we all get around and start talking about projects that we were on and what the sand was like. It’s like, “Oh my God, that sand was good.” “Oh did you work on this project?” “Oh yeah, that sand’s terrible.”
What is it that sand sculptors are looking for specifically in the sand they use?
The silt that’s in the sand is very important because that helps the sculpture to compact really tight. It’s also important how fine the sand is and the shape of the grains—if the grains of sand are too round, then they kind of roll off of each other like ball bearings.
If there’s too many rocks in the sand, that can be a big problem because you’re constantly hitting rocks and digging them out. . . . Sometimes there’s too much clay or you hit clay chunks, and it’s a little frustrating.
Some sand has this interesting quality where if you spray it with water, it dries a lighter color than sand that you have freshly carved. You can achieve this cool effect where you can make parts of your sand a slightly light color. So instead of just playing with shadow, you’re playing a little bit with tone also.
How did Washington Rock’s Ultrafine Sand meet your needs?
It packs up really hard, and the sand is so fine that I can get these really tiny details, like the [eagle in the Mexican flag]. That’s not an easy thing to do if that sand isn’t fine enough.
You’ve sculpted snow, gingerbread, ice, pumpkins, cake, sugar, chocolate, and sand. You’ve also created art from stained glass, felt, watercolors, and more. What medium would you be interested in learning next?
Sometimes the medium comes based upon meeting another artist that needs assistance on some kind of job. I just hop on board and learn how to do it.
I’ve been told that I should get into chainsaw wood carving. Maybe that’ll be the next thing I jump into just for kicks and giggles.
Your name comes up on Google as a “TV personality.” How would you like to be known?
I find it actually super funny that I come up as a TV personality because I don’t see myself as that. Yes, I have done TV competitions, and I really, really enjoy them. But if people look me up, I would prefer that they just find me as “an artist.” That’s pretty much it: kind of a “jack-of-all-trades artist.” Hire-me-to-do-anything sort of thing.
The term jack-of-all-trades tends to get a bad rap. “Jack of all trades, master of none.” Could you say more about why you identify with that title?
The whole phrase is “jack of all trades, but master of none, but oftentimes better than master of one,” but everybody cuts off that last sentence.
That’s the thing. In a lot of ways, I do call myself a jack of all trades, but I don’t call myself a master of none. I’m a master of quite a few of my trades, and I would say I’m always striving to master anything that I’m working on.
Everything that I do, I want to do it as good as any other professional in the industry. I know I have a brain that enjoys creating art, and it doesn’t have to just be in sand. It doesn’t have to just be in cake. It can be in all different media.
Why should an artist have to pigeonhole themselves in strictly one medium because somebody told them they had to master one thing? That doesn’t make any sense to me.
What is mastery to you?
Mastery to me is being more than satisfied with your work: seeing your work, being proud of your work, and always trying to improve your work. But also being very, very happy with it.
I try not to compare myself to other people. Everybody has their own style, but I want my work to live up to other artists that I work with. I am a firm believer in knowing the ins and outs of every trade that you try.
What is your advice to artists working regular jobs outside their passions?
I got some of the best advice from my breads teacher when I was at college before I went off to the real world to go and work. He could see that I was an artist, and he told me, “You need to find art outside of your job, something to feed your soul. Or else your soul will die.”
He could just recognize the soul of an artist, and he’s like, “You know what? I do ceramics. I do pottery because if I only stick to the workforce, I’ll die creatively.” So just make sure that you always do that: find the thing outside of work.
Check out other articles about artists who have used Washington Rock’s materials:
- “Archisand Sculpts Washington Rock’s Ultrafine Sand into a Pacific Northwest Masterpiece“
- “Drawing the Story Out of Stone: Sculptor Tom Small“
- “Rail Ballast as an Art Medium“
Washington Rock Quarries is a family-owned business that produces rock, sand, and soil products at Kapowsin Quarry and King Creek Pit in Orting, Washington.