Eden Whale Festival features handcrafted 'beached whale' sand sculpture on shores of Aslings Beach

"If you look at a place like Aslings Beach, it's a great office," the Sandstorm Events owner said with a laugh.

"[The sand is] a little coarse underneath, but it wasn't too bad."

Armed with his must-have sculpting tools, including a large and small margin trowel with squared ends, a boat-shaped float for smoothing, a little garden spade used for the bulk of his work, watering cans, a variety of brushes, and his concept art, he was ready to do what kids dream of - play with sand, professionally.

"With beach sand, obviously when you push it down, if you make a mound of it and stand on it to compact it, it'll squash out sideways, so the idea is to contain it, but because the whale was so big, we just did a different sort of process," Peter said.

"Some laborers helped me in the morning to do a lot of shoveling, I got the basic sort of shape, something that was sympathetic to the whale shape, and I sort of just shoveled sand on and hand-packed, foot-packed it all.

"Then [I] put a lot of water on and added some really wet sand over the top, which is a pretty quick process for when you're doing something of scale like that."

Peter said the sand often found on the tideline was quite compact due to the sand having been soaked in water, so by utilising watering cans and wetting the surface of the sculpture he was working on, the surface became strong enough to be shaped, cut and troweled.

"I had the whale done in eight hours, and you just don't know, until you start working with the sand, how well it'll hold together, how detailed you can get," he said, even researching whale eyes to capture further features.

After doing some design work with a non-profit in Melbourne back in the early 2000s, Peter, a qualified graphic designer and illustrator by trade, said he was "really really lucky" when he became aware of the craft after the non-profit was approached by a community group to see if it could help market a small sand-sculpting display.

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"I'd never seen or heard of it before then, sort of got my interest, and over the next few years I got more and more involved with it, and drifted into it," Peter said.

"That was the start of my sand sculpting career, [and] that's what I do full time."

For highly detailed sculptures created for advertising, he has used commercial brickies sand that dries as hard as sandstone, which Peter recalled had surprised and injured a vandal in the past.

"With the sand, the only thing that restricts you...is your imagination."

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