NEW FRANKLIN: Renee Volchko wielded her crumpled old Kent State ID card like a chisel Saturday.
The 28-year-old Lakewood woman had never built a sand sculpture before and hadn’t planned to enter a sand castle contest Saturday when she and her mom, Gina Volchko, went to Portage Lakes State Park.
But Gina of Kent has always fanned her daughter’s creativity, encouraging Renee to draw murals on the walls of their home when Renee was a girl. And even now that Renee is grown and works as a graphic artist, Gina prods her to try new things.
So the women decided to give sand castles a try.
Renee rummaged a cardboard box from her trunk, filled it with sand from the water’s edge and flipped it over, hoping to get a box-shaped sand base to work from.
But instead of a tidy cube, the sand collapsed into an oblong pile.
“It sort of looks like a face, I could see a giant nose,” Renee said.
Families and friends with shovels, buckets and wild imaginations worked the length of the park beach Saturday afternoon.
They created sand sculptures of sea monsters, seaweed castles and sea turtles as swimmers and Canada geese wandered by, sometimes stepping onto the works of art.
Frank Kosa and three of his children — Carolyn Frederick, Sara and Cody — said their Franklin family has taken second place at the annual contest twice.
This year, they went with Carolyn’s idea off the news. The family piled more than 4 feet of sand and was carving out Harambe, the silverback gorilla Cincinnati Zoo workers shot and killed in May after a child climbed into the animal’s enclosure.
“It was just a sad story,” Carolyn said.
Nearby, twins Maggie and Megan Begue, 12, and their family went the traditional route, building a true sand castle — trimmed in stones from the lake and a neat, winding sand staircase — dedicated to turtles.
A few feet away, Nicholas Taylor, 22, turned what he did for himself — a lounge chair built into the sand so he’d have a good place to watch fireworks after dark — into living art with a row of feathers his brother found in the woods.
About halfway through the two-hour contest, it was unclear who would win.
Renee Volchko’s pile of sand now looked like an overturned Moai, one of the giant heads on Easter Island.
She asked her mom to scavenge the surrounding woods and parking lot for other things from nature she could use.
When Gina returned, she carried scores of twigs and branches, some still covered with green leaves. She also gathered white dust from the gravel drive that rimmed the edge of the park.
The nose of their sand creature was wider now, with hollow nostrils as large as fists.
Renee inserted the twigs into the top of the sand head, giving it a wild, green swirly hairdo with a matching bushy green mustache.
She then used the white gravel dust to turn the green white.
With her Kent State ID — its plastic cover coming apart, its edges bent — she carved wrinkles into the chin and smoothed the cheekbones and ears.
“Einstein!” hollered a kid walking by.
“Yes, Einstein,” Renee declared, as her mom stood nearby beaming, using her phone to capture this holiday snapshot of their lives.
The mother-daughter team and Einstein won first place in the adult division Saturday.
Tommy De Santis, 12, Mara De Santis, 11, and Nicole Williams, 10, of Barberton won first place in the children’s division with a giant hammerhead shark.
Amanda Garrett can be reached at 330-996-3725 or agarrett@thebeaconjournal.com.