Wednesday, December 11, 2024 The Workshop: Salted Watercolor Adventures

I came across an artist on Instagram (and YouTube) who had some wonderful short tutorials for watercolor paintings that you could do in 5-10 minutes. Count me in! Her name is Emily LeFebvre if you want to check her out (emjlefebvre on Instagram).

I was intrigued in particular with her use of salt on wet watercolor to obtain certain effects – it looked positively magical! Here’s one of them:

She puts the salt on the wet watercolor and lets it dry, after which she rubs it off. The salt somehow removes the paint and creates a crystallized look that lends itself nicely to the look of snow on the trees. I gave it a try:

Ha ha! What has her salt got that mine hasn’t? I used kosher salt, just like she said! It was mostly a disaster, although I think my birds look every bit as good as hers. 😀 Undaunted I looked at another of her salted watercolor projects, figuring maybe plain table salt would do a better job. Again, here’s how hers turned out:

And mine:

I hope you’re laughing as hard as I am over the contrast between those two paintings. Table salt wasn’t the fix. She really made it look so effortless. Sigh…

I looked over her salt-free paintings and chose a couple to work on. I’m not going to show you hers because there’s not such a stark difference between hers and mine (although hers were better). Here we go:

I’m wanting to do a fun painting project with my daughter and daughters-in-law when they are here for Christmas. Between the berries and the gnomes, which do you think would be more fun to work on? Which do you like better?

I’ll be rubbing the salt off this post in the morning when it’s dry.