Sand Art

What you can do

• Paint with moving material

  Build pictures with gravity and accumulation: falling sand forms colored piles, ridges, and layered landscapes as you paint.

• Shape the forces

  Reshape the material with raking, wind, swirling, and other forces, making movement part of the composition.

• Bring in image colors

  Use colors from photographs to create source-inspired sand paintings, transforming a familiar palette into a new arrangement.

• Switch simulation modes

  Explore the companion Flow mode for washes, smears, and fluid ribbons, then pause and capture a finished image or save the supported project state.

A red flower photograph poured into blue sand with a green photographic ridgeLayered pink, purple, cyan and green sand dunes against black

What you can make

• Sand landscapes

  Sand landscapes, sediment bands, dune-like patterns, abstract paintings, and geological color studies.

• Fluid color fields

  Swirling fields, ink-like washes, fluid ribbons, and organic backgrounds for covers and posters.

• Photo-derived palettes

  Photo-derived color experiments that preserve a source palette while changing its arrangement.

• Organic texture collections

  Texture collections built by pouring, disturbing, and capturing different states of one canvas.

• Cover and poster backgrounds

  Shape colored sand or flowing material into an original background with room for imagery and type in a later design.

• A series of abstract paintings

  Keep a shared palette while developing different compositions through pouring, raking, and flow, capturing the strongest results as finished images.

A colorful racing car photograph formed into a pile of sand

Project ideas

• Successive colors settle into sediment bands, forming an abstract landscape shaped by raking and gravity.

• A photograph’s palette becomes a swirling color field or a family of organic textures for cover artwork.

What sets it apart

• Make the composition through the material’s movement. Build colored layers and ridges with sand or create fluid washes and swirling fields in Flow.

• Use a photograph or its palette as a starting point, then rearrange the colors through painting and forces. Capture organic artwork, textures, and backgrounds for another design.

Flower and landscape photographs layered into sand hills around a green stream

Supporting capabilities

• The simulated material helps form the picture as it moves. Sand and Flow offer different behaviors for granular landscapes and fluid color studies.