Ever-shifting sands form bedrock of his business.

Todd Vander Pluym is an artist, but he's also a businessman.

He doesn't blink when asked to work a commercial corporate logo into a work of art for promotional purposes, and he doesn't mind at all spending weeks on a sculpture, only to watch it be torn down the day after it's completed.

Vander Pluym is the owner of Redondo Beach-based Sand Sculptors International, a company that travels the globe making art out of sand and water for shopping malls, corporate events, business conferences and other promotional activities.

"I keep my head in the clouds but my feet on the floor," says Vander Pluym. "Logos, in themselves, are an artistic challenge. If you make one mistake, people notice. . . . I'm here to provide a service. I'm not going to tell someone that I have to have artistic control."

Vander Pluym says he's been making sculptures out of sand "all my life, just for fun." College-trained as an architect and artist, he worked as an architect in the corporate world for several years.

He won a number of sand sculpture contests before he obtained his first commercial opportunity in 1976: Dick Clark offered him $250 to construct a nine-foot-high sand castle on the beach for a television special.

"I would have done it for nothing," he recalls. "I've given up things I could have made a lot more money at to do sand sculptures. I didn't go into (sculpting) with the idea to make a lot of money."

Vander Pluym, 50, founded his company in 1981. In the past 10 years, Sand Sculptors International has built sand statues of storybook characters, hotels, famous people, city skylines and corporate symbols, to name a few, everywhere from Southern California to Florida to Australia.

He employs four full-time assistant sculptors (whom he pays within 10 percent of his own salary of about $50,000 per year). The team averages 50 to 60 sculptures per year and can work on up to four or five at a time. Each sculptor works about 12 hours per day.

"A normal theme party is a 20-hour day," says Vander Pluym. "By the time the party starts, everything has to be clean and Disney-esque."

A typical castle in the center of a shopping mall takes one or two weeks to build and costs $12,000 to $15,000. Projects for trade shows, conventions and theme parties generally cost $4,000 to $8,000, but can cost as much as $25,000 for a major promotion.

Generally, the appeal of the sculptures at corporate events lies not so much in the finished project (which usually is torn down soon after completion) as it does in the audience watching the sculptors build it over a period of days. At a business conference, for example, people will return to the same company's booth day after day to observe the work in progress.

"The only constant in the human dynamic is change. Sand sculpture is really a performing art," says Vander Pluym. "Nothing really is forever, but probably 100 million people have seen my art. . . . It helps draw attention to a booth or a corporate event. People think, 'I've got to come right away because it's going to be torn down tomorrow.' Then they find it in progress and return to watch it develop."

Although Vander Pluym has no lofty objections to turning his art into pure promotion (in fact he fired an employee once who "hated the corporate world and corporate logos"), he does draw the line on promoting things he finds personally objectionable.

"I would turn down something if I felt it was detrimental to the environment or to people or vindictive against somebody," he says. "Somebody could come to me and say, 'I want to promote nuclear power,' and I wouldn't do that."

Although he has well-trained assistants, Vander Pluym has no intention of ever turning over his business to his underlings.

"I really have to wear three hats -- artist, businessman and mechanic," he says. "I never have any intention of retiring. I'll retire when I'm dead. I enjoy each thing I do. I approach every project with the enthusiasm of the first, and as if it were (my) last."

Vander Pluym says he has a knack for creating three-dimensional images because he can look at a two-dimensional rendering, imagine the object "in space, take it apart and turn it around."

"I didn't realize until I was 27 that other people couldn't do this," he says.

Vander Pluym says sand is different on different beaches, at different depths and in different parts of the world. He collects sand samples from all over the globe, and he is very choosy about which sand he uses in his sculptures.

"Sand is as different as people are," he says.