Salt Painting

This was a quick and easy project. When my daughter first asked me about trying it, I had recently seen a video about it. I’m not sure what I was waiting for, but she finally asked again, and we pulled the supplies together in about 5 minutes. We have only scratched the surface of what you can do with salt painting, but I thought I’d share our experience.

Supplies:

cardstock

liquid glue

salt

watercolor paints (or food coloring)

paintbrush

Optional supplies:

something to cover your work surface (I used parchment paper)

a container to save excess salt

The first thing we did was draw our design on a piece of cardstock. We went with black cardstock to see how the colors would pop.

Once we had the design drawn in pencil, we traced over it with glue. Sam’s first design involved small letters, and that was tricky. She started over, and it was much easier the second time.

Next we sprinkled salt over the design. I was fairly liberal with my salt application… but maybe not quite as liberal as Sam. (Also note the lack of table covering.)

Pouring off the excess salt was kind of satisfying. I don’t even know why. I had grabbed a plastic container to save the salt in, and that satisfied my desire to not be wasteful.

I’d read that you could put the paint on while the glue was wet or dry, so we went ahead and started painting. I didn’t want to dig out my liquid watercolors, so we just used a watercolor palette that we have. I didn’t really have a plan except to make rainbow letters. This might have been easier with different watercolors, but it certainly worked. All you have to do is touch the brush to the salt, and the color starts to spread. It spread more quickly in some places than others, so some of the colors look a little out of order, but that’s okay.

I was trying to move the paper so I could dump the salt (because I didn’t actually do that till the end), and some of the watercolors ran. Oops. I dabbed up what I could with a tissue, and some of it isn’t as noticeable now that it’s dry.

I don’t know how long this particular piece of art will last since it’s made of salt, but it’s pretty for now!