Art and Creativity Journal: Spring Beach Combing

Since it was a really nice spring day today, and my general level of motivation felt somewhere close to zero, I decided the best way to spend the day was to take a good long walk on the beach to pick up stones and other interesting things.

In addition to painting on rocks, I have a separate online business where I sell various "found objects" to jewelers and artists and crafts people all around the world.

This includes such things as interesting seashells, driftwood, old pieces of glass and pottery that have been tumbled by the sea and anything else that might look interesting.

Anyway, my stock of blank stones is not exactly at a low point, but there's going to come a time in late summer and early fall when I suddenly have to start preparing for holiday events, and it'll be nice to have ample "blanks" on hand at that point.

Historically, one of my weak points has always been to plan ahead with things and I have a nasty tendency to leave everything till the last possible moment, resulting a frantic and stressful rush a few days before the actual event. I'm trying not to do that in 2026!

Thankfully, we live quite close to the beach, and the neighborhood has a couple of places with beach access with a parking lot.

Of course, when most people think of the term "beach" what they think about is sandy stretch of seashore where people might be laying out and sun tanning on their blankets. That's not exactly our beaches around here. Our beaches tend to be very rocky, often steep, and occasionally almost impassable due to driftwood logs washing ashore during storms or trees having fallen from the escarpment above.

Since it was a holiday weekend and there were lots of people out and about with their dogs and kids, I decided that I would just walk about a mile down the beach and start looking for stones and other treasures there.

It's perhaps not evident from the photo, but it's about 250 feet (80m) to the top.

The landscape around these parts is dominated by fairly high escarpments — usually 200-300 feet — interspersed with occasional low points where you can get to the beach. I wanted to get down to a place that was beyond where most people could be bothered to walk.

Since the tide was relatively low, it was not too difficult to walk as I could get out to the flat sandy and clay parts rather than having to climb over logs and large boulders.

As the photo above might suggest, there's definitely no shortage of stones on our beaches. The problem is that while there's no shortage of stones, there is a definite shortage of stones with a smooth uncracked paintable surface.

All in all, I ended up spending about two and a half hours looking for new stones and for usable driftwood for my driftwood stocks.

All in all, it was a pretty decent day and I was able to add about 50-60 paintable stones of various sizes to my stash. I consider that pretty successful!

I also managed to find some decent driftwood pieces, as well as a few seashells. That part of my outing was a bit below average, but it wasn't really my primary reason for being out there. However it is nice that I can combine my trips to help supply two different businesses.

Once home again, I went through my usual routine of thoroughly washing and sorting the day's haul. It is important to remove all traces of sand, dirt, salt and seaweed from the stones before attempting to paint them. I also do a "rough sort" to remove any that turn out to have little cracks or holes in them that would make the painting difficult or impossible.

This actually turned out to be a pretty clean haul with only a couple of stones needing to be removed. Those typically end up with decoration out in the yard somewhere.

It was a nice way to break state and get out and get some fresh air!

Happy Easter, everyone!

Thank You!

If you enjoy painted rocks, do check out The Hive Rocks Project and help spread the word about Hive, while also being creative!

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2026.04.05 AS-TXT-389/359