Watercolor Salt Texture: Soft Floral Backgrounds

1. A Gentle Introduction to Salt Texture: Today we're going to create a soft, beautiful floral watercolor painting with a textured background using a very simple technique. Salt. This is one of those techniques that feels a little bit like magic the first time you try it. You place the salt onto a wet paint and then it dries and it creates these natural organic textures that you really can't force with a brush. What I love about this method is that it allows the paint to do the work for you. While you still get to have control over the final look of your piece. In this class, we're going to keep things simple and approachable. We'll start by playing with the salt technique on a simple piece of scrap paper so you can see how it behaves and how quickly the effect can change. Then we'll move on to our final project where you'll be painting a soft background. Add in the salt texture and once everything is dry, layer in loose simple flowers on top. I'll show you how to use this technique lightly and intentionally so that your texture adds interest without taking over your painting. This class is perfect. If you're just getting started with watercolor, or if you're looking for a more relaxed way to loosen up your style and try something a little different, take a breath, grab your supplies, and let's get started. If you enjoy this process, I have more classes where we explore different ways to loosen up your florals and let that paint move in a natural way. 2. Simple Supplies to Get Started: Let's talk about some simple supplies for today's class. Of course, you're going to need some watercolor paper. I would recommend that your watercolor paper is either attached on a board like this one, where it is attached all the way around on all four sides, or if you just have a piece of paper that's loose leaf like this, then I really suggest that you tape it down to some other form of a board. Get out your artist tape and tape it down to something maybe it's a clipboard or a particle board like this or a piece of Plexiglass, something else because we're going to be needing to pick it up off of the table and moving our paper around to let the water flow. You don't necessarily want it to be locked down to your tabletop because you're not going to be able to pick it up and move it around. So if you don't have a piece of paper that is on a board that is glued down on all four sides, then definitely attach it to something else. So of course, you're going to need some water, have a couple paint brushes. I recommend a couple of different sizes. You can have something, a normal size six or eight or ten. But then if you have a larger brush, something like this, or a flat brush, something that's going to allow you to get a lot of water and paint onto your canvas quickly. So, you know, eyeglasses if you're like me. Paint, watercolor paint, whichever kind you have. If you have a big palette like that, that's fine. If you have something simple like this, this is also fine, whatever you happen to have on hand will work perfectly. I like to have a spray bottle. I like to spray down my watercolor paint regardless of which kind of paint I have. I like to spray down my paint and I'm also going to need it to spray down my paper. One of the things that is key for today's class is salt. We're going to play with the texture of salt in our watercolor. This is just a pink salt, just my table salt, but I like to put it in a little container. I have a little lid, and I can store it here on my desk, and that way I have it whenever I want it. You don't need much, a little bit will go a long way. I will probably only use a couple pinches. Your salt can be any salt you have. If you only have kosher salt and it's the larger granulars, that's fine. If you have thinner salt or smoother salt, if your salt is just your regular umbrella, that brand, salt, that will also work. Whatever you have is going to be fine, it will create different textures depending on your coarseness of your salt, but whatever you have will work. So I think and then if you want to, you can print out. I'm going to have this in the attachment of your class project. A drawing like this. This is just something from the computer that I printed out. And I have that saved for you so that you can print it out. You can print it out smaller or larger depending on what you're going to want to do. I'm going to be making this painting landscape this time, so it's going to fit on it here. If I wanted to make it go this direction, it does still fit, but, um, it might be better if you had trunk this down. So you can change the size on your printer settings to be a different size of painting a printing, but you also can just free hand this or just paint your own flower. You don't have to get this particular. That's up to you. And I just want to mention that my watercolor paint paper that I'm using today is this 12 by eight size. So I'm going to be painting inside of that for my piece, and I'll be doing it landscape. Okay, I think that's about it. So come back to the next lesson, and we're going to get right into it. 3. Practicing the Salt Technique: We're going to play around with our salt first before we dive into our class project. It's important for you to test your salt and to make sure that you understand how much water, how much paint, how much dry it is or how wet it needs to be. Practice in a couple of different ways. I'm going to do that here to show you what I have in mind. I'm just going to use a pretty blue and we're going to just dive right into it. So if I do it here and I add that and that's a lot of water on top. You can see it kind of moving around. And if I go and sprinkle this in right away, that's going to dissolve my salt. There's so much water in there that that's just going to get completely dissolved and we're going to lose that effect completely. So I would have needed to have waited for that paint to have dried more before I did that effect. So using my same paint brush, I'm just going to move it over here and do another one. And I'm going to do another one here because we're going to let that one dry a little bit longer. You can see that they're very, very wet. They're not soaking. This one was soaking wet, so that's just not going to work at all. But here, I'm going to add some salt to this one. And you can see that that pulls all that pigment, all the paint gets pulled right up into that salt. Add a little bit more here. And then on this one over here, I'll add a little bit more because that's drier. So it's very wet. Almost too wet, possibly the right wetness. And we're going to try another one over here. We'll do it again. We're going to let this one get a little on the drier side. So the other thing you can practice when you're doing that is what happens if you sprinkle it from up high? You know, if you just sprinkle a little bit here and a little bit there, it spreads out. If you put it down near it and you put a little pile, that's what's going to happen there. You know, here's another little pile of the salt. This one's almost dry. It's still shiny, but it's really dry. So we're going to sprinkle some on that, too. And then we'll do another one. I need to get a little bit of paint. So we're gonna let that just dry even more. So that we can really show the effect of if it gets too dry, what is going to happen. So it's going from my wettest down to my driest. I have to wait for that one because that's too wet right now. That's more like the wetness of this one here. We're going to let that one dry a little bit, but we can come back up here and take a look. You can see that this one is not going to work out. It's way too wet. This one is okay. It created a really interesting effect, but because it was really wet, it made much larger effect that there's a lot larger white spots. This is a pretty cool effect. This one's going to be interesting when dry. I like this one a lot. Okay, we're going to try this one now. You can see that it's still wet. There's some moisture in it still, but it's almost completely dry. So I'm going to go ahead and sprinkle some salt on top of that, and we will see what happens there. It's got salt all the way out to the outside edges. It will find the wet areas and soak that in. So we will still get an effect here because it's almost better to go on the drier side than on the wetter side. So now what we do is we let this sit. If you go and dry it off with a heat gun too soon, you've lost an opportunity because the longer the salt sits and dries with the paint, the more of a response and a reaction you're going to receive. So if you just did a long time lapse of this, you would see that these have changed so much from when you first sprinkled it on till now when it's almost dried on its own, it's really best to just let this dry almost completely by itself before you use a heat gun on it so that it can naturally pull that paint and pull itself pull that paint towards itself. So I'm going to give it just another couple seconds, and then I will use the heat gun. But I want you to practice this. I want you to try this. I want you to see it for yourself how wet your paint has to be in order to use the salt. Okay, so here, these are completely dry now, and you can see this top one that was really wet. You can see that it kind of made a run because I think that salt dissolved and just actually ran in the pigment, which is kind of cool, but not really the effect I was going for. This one's going to be really cool, too. You can brush this salt off and you're going to be able to see these great big texture pieces. You know, they're all different, so it really kind depends on what you're looking for. And here is our driest, and you can see it has the least amount of texture. Now, all of these, you should not try to brush off this salt unless your painting is 100% dry. If it is not 100% dry, it will smear when you go and rub that off. So that's really important that that is dry. You can use your finger like that, or you can use a paper towel and just gently rub it with your paper towel. You just have to know that you can brush off the paint if you're not extra extra careful. So just make sure you're doing it extra gentle, extra careful. When it's extra wet like this one, it's really embedded into the paint and a lot harder to get off. I'm gonna clean up my desk. Don't need all that salt on it. Okay. So there you go. There's your different levels of wet and how the texture changes depending on how wet your paper is. So please go do this project and come back to the next lesson where we're going to actually put this salt on an art project so that we can get some textures, which is going to be really fun and beautiful. And I think you're going to have a lot of fun doing it. So you're in the next lesson. 4. Painting a Soft Background Wash: Welcome back. We're gonna get started right away. This is going to be such a fun class learning to work with salt in a watercolor. So I'm just going to do I got this all sprayed down and wet, so I'm just going to do a quick little cleanup of my palette. Sometimes I clean it up. Sometimes I just let it be messy and use those extra colors. So I think for today, I'll just do a quick little cleanup, get rid of some of that old paint color combinations so I don't get too muddy. So what we're going to be doing is we're going to be making a very fun background that has lots of beautiful texture. And the way we're going to do that is get started is just spray this down with some water. We're not going to get it completely soaked, kind of spraying a little bit of water down on there. Let me pick this up so you can see that if you can catch that glimmer. It has water on it. It's sprayed. It's not perfectly spread out or anything, but it is on there. That's going to help with allowing this water to flow for the background. When we practiced our salt in the last class, last lesson, we knew that if you have too much water, you have to wait quite a long time before you can add your salt. On the other hand, if you are too dry, then this salt technique will not work. It is a little bit of a balance. I'm going to show you what we're going to do here for the background and get started right away. I know that my flower that I'm going to paint when this is completely dry is going to go into the center. I want to keep all of my darkest color and darkest value out towards the outside corners, and I'm going to allow some of it to bleed into the center. Using my larger brush, this is a synthetic quill brush, so it's nice and fat and floppy. It holds so much water. It's really great. I'm going to be adding some greens and this is a really dark green color, almost mossy, adding in water when I need to. Maybe even pick up a different color green, all different shades. We're just going to drop some of that in here and smear that around. This is such a fun way to paint. I'm not worried about going edge to edge here. That's I need a little bit more water over here. Not too worried about an edge to edge look. I'm just going to let it flow and see what happens now. Remember, we're just painting around the edge because we're going to be adding in some water and letting this all flow together and creating a beautiful look. Now, some of the paint that I'm using is granulating paint. And you may or may not have granulating paint, and that's okay. I just wanted to mention it up front that as you start to see some of my paint dry, you might notice that some of it dries in a unique way, which is cool. It's great because it's going to really settle in. Maybe you can see if I can zoom in there. You're going to see some of that starting to settle. Now that I have the outside edge, remember I'm protecting my inside. Some of the darkest colors. Washing out my paintbrush. I'm just going to drop some water along the top and this paint brush, holding the paper up, letting that just flow. I can let it flow this way too, adding more water, just letting it flow. I'm trying to get it to go into the middle. Remember, watercolor only flows to where the paper is wet. If my paper hasn't gotten wet in the center, it's not going to flow there. I might have to help it out a little bit by getting it wet. But you can see that I'm keeping my darkest edges and my lighter spots in the middle. Okay. So now that I have that going on, I'm going to add a little bit of brown and a little bit of yellow. I think that's gonna be a really fun addition. Maybe I'll add a little splashes of yellow over here. Again, picking this up and letting it flow. Oh, it's so fun to just watch to see what's going to happen. So we're just going to allow that to move around. You can pick it up, really let it flow across. I like the fact that I don't have a structured edge. It's just going to be very organic, letting my yellows and my greens mix together. The center is still the lightest. Remember, when watercolor dries, it dries lighter than what you see here. So that will be a good just add in green some brown, excuse me, maybe even some stripies. Maybe these are some organic pieces. Let that flow. Add a little more water if you want to. So you're going to have to do yours listening to your painting. If your painting is saying, Oh, no, I don't need any brown, then don't add any brown. If yours doesn't need more water, then don't add more water just because I did. You have to listen to your painting. I'm just going to let that flow across. I'm liking the way that's looking. I hope you can see how shiny it is. It's very wet. It is pooling. You can see the water running, but it's not puddles. You can see that I have some puddles down here at the edge because I've allowed all this water to just coast down here. But that's about it. That's running across. Okay. So I kind of like that. I think that having these flowers here in the center is going to be really cool. I don't think I need more, but I am noticing that when I lay my paper down, I'm getting a little wave in the paper and then some puddles that are forming here. I'm just going to use a paper towel. You could use a cloth just just lightly, just ever so lightly dabbing up little spots that maybe have puddles of water that I don't need. I'm just going to I didn't pick up very much, just a little bit. I'm gonna let that flow again. Make sure I don't have too much water. Because, again, we want to be able to add in our salt. But not if it has too much water. I won't I won't take the effect well. So looking this over, I'm feeling like it might be ready for some salt. When we add in our salt, we are not putting salt over the whole thing. We're going to be strategic. I think when I add in my flour, I might also want to add some salt to my flowers. So I don't want to be putting salt over the whole thing, which means I also want to make sure I'm not putting salt in the center, so I want to leave that for my flowers. I'm going to come in here. I can see that this is starting to It's shiny, but it's a little dull in some areas, so I'm just going to sprinkle a little bit on here. I really zoomed in on the camera so that you're going to be able to see this. When I drop the salt down in here, do you see how it's just attracting that paint right away? I can't put it here because this is way too wet there, but I could put some over here in this corner, maybe some over here. Maybe some around the outside edge. This is going to just create a great effect. That's about it. I'm not going to go any further. I'm going to let that go and see how that looks. Now, here's the thing. It's really important that you not mess with this, that you let this just dry. I'm gonna soak up this little spot. It's a little too wet. I didn't put salt in this area because I knew it was too wet. Okay, so I'm going to just let this dry for a couple minutes, and then I'm going to use my heat gun to finish drying it. And then we will see how it looks and rub off that salt. Okay, so now I'm back to show you this texture. Look at that amazing texture. So I have not brushed this off yet. This still has salt all over it, but you can see that really cool effect. See where you can even see a single salt piece there and the white all the way around it. Isn't that so cool? Look at all this effect right here, where I had sprinkled in white, some salt, and it just pulled the pigment in towards itself, leaving that little white space. So we're going to see it more down in here. So now what I'm going to do is actually brush this off with some paper towel or a rag or to use my hand, whatever you want to do. You know, you can just kind of brush it and just very gently move it away and loosen it up. You can also use a rag or a paper towel, and you can just gently, very gently because you don't want to ruin the paper or get the paint off. You're not trying to rub it, you know, vigorously, just very, very gently. I feel like that's pretty good. I like to clean up my table because I don't want that salt to get on anything in the future if I didn't want it to. You only want to use salt intentionally. Make sure your table work surface is always clean. So that's pretty cool. There it is. You see that. Okay. So now what we're going to do is the second half. That was it. That was so easy to create this beautiful background with so much texture, adding lots of different layers of colors, using several different greens and some darker colors and some lighter colors and then just letting it pour into the middle. I gave this natural highlight area here in the center, which I think is going to be really awesome. So now with my little flower that I want to make, I'm going to use my carbon paper. And if you've joined it in my classes in the past, you know how this works. There's a shiny side, a darker side, that's going to go down onto my painting. The duller side, the grayer side goes faces up, and then I position this where I want it. Then using a pencil, I just do a very light outline. I don't need to outline both sides of the stem. I can tell that the stem is going to go kind like this. I put a bud there. You know, I don't have to put in the exact leaves because I can just paint those. But I think I might add in, you know, a flower here because I might just go ahead and paint these flowers exactly as they are. I think they're so pretty. But again, I'm just painting it, drawing it on lightly and loosely. I don't have to do all the little details. If you want to do all the details, you go right ahead. That's why I have it here for you so that you can do this at whatever level you are at. If you want to trace this exactly, you go right ahead. If you don't want to trace it at all and you want to put a butterfly here in the center instead or a bird, that would also be beautiful. Whatever is going to work for you. I'm not going to bother with the leaves. I'm gonna just double check, make sure that I can see these things. I was very, very faint, but maybe just a little too faint. Okay, now I can see it. All right. So I don't need this anymore. 5. Adding Loose Florals on Top: So now I think what I'm going to do is go ahead. I'm going to use my size eight brush. I'm gonna grab some of that green. I really like this dark dark dark green. I think that's pretty cool. Almost almost like a black green. So I'm just gonna add my stem right here. I'm gonna add this one. I know I'm gonna branch off. And then I know that I want to put a leaf here and a leaf over here somewhere. So I'll just leave those sitting there for now. Just thicken that up a little bit more at the base. Maybe I know that I'm going to have that top of that flower. We'll do that. I think I want to add a little bit of this green. This is a really pretty mossy green. If you don't have these colors, you can mix those colors. You can make them yourself. Just going to add the flour leaf here, add another one. Just a very simple leaf. Then I think I want to add a little bit of that darker color in here at spots. Add a little depth. Okay. And now, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm just going to sprinkle. Before this dries the tiniest amount into these leaves. Okay. Now, what color am I going to make these flowers? Mm. Kind of like the. Let's take a look at that color. It's kind of like a earthy I kind of like that. I think that's gonna look really neat with this. So I'm going to go ahead and just get started on one of these back petals because I actually traced my petals on, I'm going to go ahead and do a wet on wet where I'm going to wet down that back petal. And then I'm going to add in some of that really nice earthy color, maybe even add in just a little bit of pink that redder color that we had. I'm going to let that one dry a little bit. Maybe add just a little bit of yellow. Just some drops of yellow in there. That's too wet for salt, and it's also too wet to do the other petals. But I can see I can get this petal done. So if you're not going to do a wet on wet like this and you just want to do a loose flower and just be a little bit more organic with your flowers, you go right ahead. You wouldn't need to do all of this, what I'm doing here. You could just go ahead and paint your flowers however you want to. Just mixing in that yellow with that other color. Give me a little bit of a border. That's going to take a second to dry, so I'm going to leave that one alone and gum over here to this one. I think I'll just do this one over here. I ding down just a little bit of water. I'll use that darker red in the center. And then some of that, it's such a pretty color around the outside edge of this petal. Drying off my paint brush because I'm going to bring it in here and see if I can't get that to just flow without getting too dark. Okay. So I think these three are actually ready for a little bit of salt. So I'm just going to sprinkle it. I'm not going to do much, just a little bit. Blowing off the little extra. I go to skip that middle one. Come over here. Add a little bit of water. This one. Just letting that flow. I don't want it to get too dark. I want it to be fairly transparent. Lifting up any extra water. I do think I want to have that pink or redder color down here in the center. Along this edge. Okay But before I can move on, because this one's touching this one and here, and this is touching these side ones, and same over here. These three are being touched by these. I have to dry this, which is fine. I'm just going to go ahead and dry it. I'm not going to brush off the salt. I just need to get it dry enough so that I can move on to the next petals. Okay. So that was easy. I'm going to go ahead and wet down this big flour petal in the front. You can see that I'm not soaking it. I'm just getting it lightly wet. Just enough so that when I put my next color on it can flow around a little bit. I like mixing my different colors in my flower petals. I feel like it makes it feel a little bit more organic and real. You see how much lighter it dries from where you started and so much darker when you first start. And then it dries into this really beautiful color. That's what we're going for. In a little yellow. Okay Like, maybe this one needs a little yellow, too. Now, I'm making that center area of the flower a little darker, so I'm putting in that red into that center. I'm gonna let that just blend together a little bit. I do want this to kind of separate. That's okay. I'll do this one. And I am covering over the graphite paper, the carbon paper, that ink that I put down transferred on. I'm covering over that with some water so that I make sure that when I put my paint down, it's going to actually cover that. Putting this on the outside. Let that flow. I feel like this needs to move around a little bit more. And then add some of this red into the middle again. Well, because we dried this one, it's not blending over into that side. That's why we take our time to make sure that we get the petals that are next to each other, dried off because then it won't flow that way. Okay, I'm going to add a little bit to the center of that flour. Might have been too dry, but that's okay. We'll see what happens. Come over here and do this one. I don't need to do that center. So if we look at the flower again, the centerpiece is going to be done differently. I'm just avoiding that middle. If your paintbrush is too wet, just have your rag next to you that you can dab it off. Grabbing some yellow, dropping some yellow in. Learn to keep your paint brush at just the right wetness by keeping this rag next to you. Dropping a little bit of salt. I didn't put salt on all of them, just on some of them. I think that one is ready now. Because this is a front petal and we really can't see the inside of this flower at all, I have to treat this one a little bit different. Either has to be lighter or it has to be darker so that it looks like a different gives you the right dimension. I think I'm going to go with it just being a little bit more on the darker side. I think I'm going to put some yellow up there in the center at the top of that flower. Petal. I want it to be kind of a creamy yellow texture so that it kind of stays put there. Right along the edge. Gives a little definition between one petal and the other. 6. Removing the Salt and Revealing Texture: Now I'm going to this is dry. I'm going to brush off very gently brush off all the salt that were on the petals. You do not want to brush this off if it is not 100% dry. Your painting will smear. So you need to make sure that it is completely dry before you try to brush off that salt. You can test it. You can try it in one spot or something and see if it smears, but you want to make sure it's completely dry. This is looking really cool. Okay. So now what I'm going to do spin this around. I'm going to use a smaller paint brush. This is more like a um a detail brush. Because I want to put in the center little spiky things. If we come back over here, you can see that this has the little lines that come up from here and that there's some in there. I want to do them. I'm using this gray. You could use whatever color you wanted to. I'm going to use this dark dark dark dark color and see how I just push it away, push it away, different sizes. Some of them are shorter, some of them are longer. Some of them are connected. Some of them aren't. Come over and do the same thing, different angles. Makes it look more organic and real. And then I want to add in some little dots. I'm just going to same thing, adding in little dots. Sometimes they come up into the flower head. Sometimes they're down in low, not in any pattern. Something like that. Okay. That's fun. What fun. Just going to add in maybe little veins, little things that you see in flowers, using the same colors. Not tons of them, little bits here and there. Just shows a little bit more movement in your flowers. We want to be able to make sure that that salt shines through. Okay. I think that's good. It's hard to start. Stop. I think I'm going to do some in the leaves as well. Using still my same one, just loosening up some of that, adding a little vein. If you're going to do the side ones, I recommend three as a max because otherwise, you can just look really, really busy. Okay. So I'm gonna let this finish drying and then come back to the next lesson where we wrap this up. I hope you had fun doing that. 7. Finishing Touches and Next Steps: You just finished your piece, and I hope you can already start to see how much interest that simple salt can really add to your painting. This is one of those methods that really adds reward with a light touch. The more you work with it, the more you'll start to understand how the timing, the amount of water, and even just a few grains of salt can completely change the outcome. If your results look different than mine, that's completely normal. This technique is naturally unpredictable and that's part of what makes this so fun. Every piece is going to have its own texture and its own personality. If you have a few minutes, I'd really encourage you to try this again on another small piece of paper. Maybe adjust the amount of water or use a little bit more or less salt and just see what happens. That simple repetition is where you really start to build confidence for your class project. I would love for you to upload your final floral painting. You can always include your practice piece if you'd like to show how your texture developed. It's always helpful for other students to see that process and it's a great way to track your own process too. I spend time almost every day going through that art gallery. I truly enjoy seeing what you've created. Even a simple version is absolutely worth sharing. If you enjoyed this class, I'd love for you to follow me here on Skillshare. I have more classes where we can explore different flowers, techniques, and ways to create loose, natural watercolor pieces without feeling overwhelmed. If you found this class helpful, leaving a quick review always does make a difference. It helps other students find the class and lets me know what you're enjoying and what you'd like to see more of. Most importantly, just keep painting. The more you show and let that paint move. The more comfortable and natural this will start to feel.