Watercolors and salt – two of our favorite materials. We have done salt on watercolor paintings to see how the crystals soak up the pigment and water, we drizzled salt on glue and then touched it up with watercolors to see how they spread on the paper… but this was the first time we made these very sensory paintings. 

We don’t really have snow in Sammamish… not this year anyway. Last year we were snowed in couple of times (by snowed in I mean 1 inch of snow and all stores closed down because of it ;)). Anyway, we still like to do some winter and snow related activities in January. This was really simple and fun.

First we talked about shades and tints and used blue and white tempera paint to cover the whole paper. Then we added a lot of glue on top and sprinkled it with salt. We brought regular table salt, large-crystal sea salt and epson salt for the kids to compare and contrast. They loved mixing them all together.

The paintings were drying on a drying rack for about three days but once they were done, they were stunning. They kept most of the salt and all the paint, glue and salt reacted together so nicely, you could see purple in there, dark streaks of glue, puddles and circles on paint… so pretty! This will be something we will go back to again… maybe rainbow colors next time around?