 Hi there, it's Sandy and I'm going to be using some salt today with watercolor. And I've been doing some experimenting and trying to figure out how to explain when it works and when it doesn't work. I've had lots of failed experiments over the years with salt and I've had some successes and I've not usually known why one or the other happens. But in the past couple of weeks I've been playing around with it more to try to determine what makes it work and from the best of what I can tell I'll give you my tips. I've started out by painting this entire background with water. So I wanted the whole painting to be wet first and then I'm adding in a lot of color. The more color you have the more texture you'll see because you get more contrast. The salt is still going to do the same thing in a very pale color but you're not going to see it because there's not enough contrast for all those little spikes of the salt to show up. The colors I'm using are a phthalo blue turquoise mixed with Payne's blue gray so I could make it darker and some lunar blue. Lunar blue when it's really pale and really soft it starts to turn into a light blue itself just at the edges and I thought the two of these might be really nice together and I wanted to leave a light area in the center with all the heavier color around the outside. Now given that I was going to be using salt I had a general idea for what I wanted to paint but I didn't really know how it was going to turn out so with watercolor you're at the mercy of what watercolor does especially when you're going to add salt to it because there's no way to guarantee exactly what's going to happen but you can know some things. The warpiness that you see on the paper is going to cause a little bit of problems which is why it's a little harder to do this for a large painting than it is for anything else because when that moisture is all collected in one place the salt is going to travel along with that moisture you'll actually see it in a minute I'm going to do a time lapse for the salt portion and you can almost see the water still traveling you can see how long it stays moving which is kind of an interesting science thing if you're wondering about how watercolor works but I'm trying to move the board around so that that moisture spreads itself out more evenly because what I find is that the more even the moisture is the more even the texture will be. If you want to create some areas where there's motion and make sure you have more water in that particular area if you're fancy enough to be able to figure that out and be able to plan it ahead of time I don't know maybe I'll get to that point at some some point I don't really know but when winter comes I tend to paint a lot of snow so we'll see if I figure that out I'll be playing with it more but once I got it at least to the point where I couldn't see it moving anymore there were still some areas that now were already dried there was not really much of a sheen left which means there's not going to be much salt action and that's just going to be how it is I'm sprinkling one packet of salt you know just salt from your local you know fast food place that you grab one of their salt packets or you can get salt from the kitchen you can use sea salt all different kinds of salt will do different slightly different things but regular salt is all that's really needed one packet over the whole thing and then let it sit there and let it do its own thing if you try to move it yourself if you try to heat dry it or anything you could end up making either messes or you could end up like securing the salt to the paper I've had some paintings that had salt on them that would not let go I could not get them off for anything and I don't know what's going to happen to a piece of paper with salt burned onto the surface of it it may eat through it eventually I don't really know so let it dry on its own I went to the post office while this was happening so I wasn't able to sit here and watch it but now when I'm watching it you can almost see in the center where there was a larger puddle and getting more movement there's the illusion of some kind of movement so if you're trying to create that then make sure you have extra moisture in the area that you want it to move everywhere else you'll end up getting more of a starburst kind of effect from each of the salt crystals and as far as how much salt to put on that's something you need to experiment with I would suggest getting a big piece of paper like this and just cover it with paint and take a picture of it so you know exactly how much of whatever was there was there salted up in different ways so that you have some that used a lot of salt some used a little and see what happens and just make notes for yourself about what you want to try using but as I was at the post office while this was happening was maybe 45 minutes and when I came back it was relatively dry because it's still warm weather where I live but in other climates it might take longer and especially if you have a lot of puddling going on in the paper if you start rubbing the paper and rubbing all that salt off while it's all on the on the paper and it's moist you're going to be dragging any of that texture around any that paint you're going to be physically moving it which means any texture you've got is going to get weird if you have not heat set the salt then you should be able to rub it off very lightly with light pressure from your hand and it should just come right off if you have heat set it you will be working at it to try to get the salt off and some of it might just refuse I'll just tell you that when it came to adding the painting then and whatever subject matter it was going to be it did not end up being exactly what I was picturing in my head when I first started this it seemed to be like there was a path in the middle that was left by the lightest areas and so I thought trees on either side of a path might be lovely and started just throwing trees in there randomly my tree on the right is a little crooked and I did have to fix it after finishing this so you'll see the finished painting at the end but the positive painting that I decided to do in this was the tree trunks along with spattering because I needed more contrast it had gotten really pale and I wanted it to have more punch to it and so doing some positive painting with the brush would have meant seeing a lot of brush strokes and I thought the spattering might be something that might soften the idea of brush strokes and leave the focus now on something that I decided to add in the center I needed a figure of some kind to draw the viewer down into the painting and I thought a deer walking through the forest might be nice so I added a deer using again the same lunar blue I'm using a very light wash of it and I'll also put some as a shadow underneath of the deer so he has some somewhere to walk on and a shadow area around them and then started using a little bit of water to soften it and some thicker paint to draw more attention to him because as in every bit of art that you've ever seen me talk about contrast and having that white area in contrast with his dark neck I thought would really draw attention to the center of the painting now if you're wondering does this work on cards yes it does and over on MFT's channel on Friday not today on Friday there will be a video for this card so you can go see that over on their channel and enjoy a little more of salt with watercolor and in the meantime I will just say ta-ta for now I will see you again in a couple days with another video take care bye