Stormy Weather Salt and Watercolor

Hello! It's Lynnea and I am so excited to be kicking off the new year with my first project on the Craftin Desert Divas blog using one of my favorite techniques - watercolor! Today I'm going to show you how to step up a simple ombre watercolor background using something you probably have in your kitchen!!

Here's the card I made! Super cute, right?!

First you will want to gather your supplies - some watercolor paper, your preferred watercolors, a brush ( I used a 1/2" flat brush) and the special ingredient...salt! You can use any kind - regular table salt works great, but I chose a coarser salt. Experiment with what you have!

I started by taping down my watercolor cardstock to my work surface. You're going to be wanting a lot of water for this technique, so I recommend taping down the cardstock to prevent warping. I added a layer of clean water to cover the watercolor paper then I started adding color in rainbow order. The key to this technique is to add plenty of water. Once I had added my colors I sprayed down the cardstock with water just to make sure I had enough water sitting on top of my paper.

Once I had the color on the paper with plenty of water I added my salt. I wanted a lot of texture in the background, so I added quite a bit of salt. The coarser the salt the more texture there will be. Regular table salt will work for this technique, but the results will be different.

I set my watercolor piece aside to dry and started working on my images. I stamped two images from the Stormy Weather stamp set with a black pigment ink and used the same watercolors I used for the background to color the little duck and rainbow.

The watercolor set I used happens to have a waterbrush included in the set, but I prefer to use a number 2 round brush to color my images. I find that I can control the flow of water much easier than I can with a waterbrush.

Once the watercolor piece was dry I took my panel over to the garbage and brushed away the salt. This is the resulting background! The salt pushes away the water leaving behind a grainy texture! I sprayed down my piece with some silver glitter spray to add more texture and shine!

I die cut the largest of the rectangles from the Inside Scalloped Rectangles die and added it over my panel. I popped up my images along with my sentiment with foam squares and this card is done! Thanks for joining me!

Supplies: 

Stormy Weather Stamps

Inside Scalloped Rectangle Dies

Versafine Onyx Black Ink