Tuesday 30 September 2014

Using Salt with watercolour

Having been the the kitchen for my last post with the cling film, I thought I would carry on the theme and look at using salt with watercolour. This is a very simple technique to explain, the difficultly with using salt is it can be unpredictable.

Firstly lets look at how to use salt. Most of my students suggest that rock salt is the best, however I find that just normal table salt will work as well. The larger the crystal the more pigment it will suck out. While the paint is wet drop the salt onto the paper and then wait until the paint has dried and then brush the salt off. The salt will stuck the pigment out of an area around the salt in a star shape. You could use this effect for, snow or flowers, or stars or for anywhere you just want a little more texture.

The problems with this technique is if the paint is too dry the salt can not act on it, if the paint is too wet it will just swamp the salt and again it will not do anything.

There are four levels of wetness
1 – Very Dry, the paper is warm to touch and the salt will drop off when tilted, and not make any effect.
2 – Damp, the paper looks dry and is not shiny but it feels cold and damp to the touch. This is too dry for the salt to work, but may still be damp enough for the paint to have soft edges.
3 – Wet, the paper is shiny but you can see the texture of the paper. This is the wetness that you want when you use salt.
4 - Very wet, the water is a pool on the paper and it is very shiny. There will be a puddle on the paper maybe the paper has cockled and a puddle has formed. This is too wet for the salt and will just swamp it and not have any effect.

If the salt is placed too close together in a lump it will not work very well either. Very large pieces of salt can remove an area the size of a coin, smaller grains will just make a star a couple of mm across.


What do you think, have you tried this? How did it go?