Creating a beach is so hard

Animation isn't as easy as we thought, especially since there's no way to create objects by freehand drawing. Instead, everything has to be a modification of their models, boxes, cones, etc. The tutorials are misleading, we took close to 3 hours to complete a 45 minutes tutorial... We decided to create the beach first, but even something that looks as simple as that was more difficult than we thought. To create the slope of the beach, we had to fiddle around with the slice modifier for like... 1 hour +? Oh, but we're still learning!