I literally went nuts with this project which I made for the Summer Beach Art Contest by LimeDreaming At a recent bronie meetup I could salvage a coconut shell, hoping to make something of it. When I saw the theme of the contest it seemed very fitting to engrave my OC Leafhelm at the beach onto the shell.
 
Leafhelm is a mapmaker and not the type to just “chillax” at the beach. “Doing nothing” is not relaxing for him. When it comes to sports, he would probably just be flying around rather than doing something typical for a beach. However, building sandcastles, sandtowns, sandrealms would probably be very much like him :D  
His trademark helmet is being used as a bucket or sand mold or both in this image.  
I could well imagine an exchange between him and one of his friends on the beach to run along these lines:  
“Stop mapping, Leafhelm!”  
“I am not, I am just building a sandcastle!”  
“It is an accurate 1:1200 scale model of Canterlot! That counts as mapping!”  
“Awww.”
 
I have never before done anything with a coconut shell, so I did some testing on another piece of the shell. My first idea was to engrave through the dark shell to its much lighter inside so the lighter lines would stand out. Unfortunately the lighter inside is thin as paper and after I had accidentally punctured it twice I instead outlined the whole character with a drilled through line. I then tried pyrography which worked out well, but unfortunately the lines didn’t show very clearly on the dark brown nutshell. So I added some acrylic color to make everything stand out clearer.  
A final challenge was to catch a few seconds of sunlight while there is mostly cloudy and overcast weather over here at the moment. Without proper sunlight the colors in the little scene I set up with the shell look much more dull.