Watercolor Painting Salt Technique

Video Transcript

"Ok. Now we're going to do a popular method - technique - called "salt technique." This takes a little while to work, so I'm going to start the exercise with this. First off, you get a dense color - I'm using Phthalo Blue, but you can use Payne's Grey or Burnt Umber or any of the darker colors. They work much better than the lighter colors as far as this technique goes. And basically, you just paint a wet-on-wet or a flat wash; it doesn't matter, but make it very dense because the effect is more dramatic with a dense wash. You need; basically, salt that hasn't been exposed to air and humidity. It works a lot better than salt that's just been lying around. If it's been in a sealed area, it's much better. Now how much salt do you use? Well, this is a little less than a square inch. You don't want any more than 15 grains in a square inch, and I've already dropped that many grains. So I'm going to pick up a few and drop a few into the area. And if you noticed, it started working very quickly, but this is unusual. Normally, it takes a few minutes for it to work, sometimes up to 15 or 20 minutes. And what happens is it starts making stars where those grains of sand - that is, grains of salt - hit. So we're going to let that work while I'm doing other things."