Paintings...With a Dash of Salt

Before I get to our beautiful art project, I want to show you what we did that led up to the project. We are doing a little science theme this week and today we did several experiments about dissolving. I got this idea from The Picky Apple. I brought in a few things for the kids to mix with water. I had three containers and the kids took turns and passed them around. We tried coffee:

Rice:

Magic Noodles:

Smarties (leftover from our Octopus craft):

Sugar and Salt, which you can't really see:

And white chocolate candy corn M&Ms:

Seriously:

Hey, I was just using what I had on hand. And BTW, these tasted awful. I got them because I love candy corn and my husband loves M&Ms. But no, no, no. So anyway, after all that, we ended up using the salt with our art. I saw this idea at The Joy of My Life. And although I don't think ours turned out as cool as theirs did, I still liked the results. We started by brushing water over white construction paper.

Then we painted with watered-down tempera paint.

Finally, we sprinkled regular table salt onto our paintings.

The salt made a really cool effect.

And as it dried it left some beautiful art.

I was hoping the salt would dissolve a little bit more, but it didn't. I started scraping it off, but it was too much work, so I left it. I actually really liked the technique of just painting on wet paper, so we might have to try this again without salt.

And maybe it was just the colors we chose. I think the pink, blue and purple are just stunning!