Andoni Bastarrika, a multi-media artist from Spain’s Basque Country, has been getting a lot of attention for his ultra-realistic animal sculptures made almost exclusively with sand.
Bastarrika has been entertaining beach-goers in his native Basque Country region for almost a decade now, but he only recently garnered international acclaim, after a photo of one of his sand sculptures – a life-size sitting bull – recently went viral on Reddit. People couldn’t stop talking about how lifelike the sculpture looked, from the subtle muscle definition to the hair-like sand detailing on its forehead. Soon photos of other of Bastarrika’s realistic sand animals started circulating on various social media networks.