Sand animation is a performance art technique in which an artist tells stories by creating animated images with sand. Inspired by this medium, we have developed a new multitouch digital artistic medium named SandCanvas that simplifies the creation of sand animations. SandCanvas also goes beyond traditional sand animation with tools for mixing sand animation with video and replicating recorded free-form hand gestures. In this paper, we analyze common sand animation hand gestures, present SandCanvas’s intuitive UI, and describe implementation challenges we encountered. We also present an evaluation with professional and novice artists that shows the importance and unique affordances of this new medium. Author Keywords Sand animation, multi-touch, tabletop computing, creativity ACM Classification Keywords H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous. General Terms Design, Experimentation, Human Factors