Watercoloring a Salted Abstract Cherry Tree

 This week Suz is sharing this video seen here on YouTube from Emma Jane Lefebvre called Create Cherry Blossom Trees with Watercolor & Salt. So, she says you need to experiment and find a way that works. And my trial notebooks are not the paper I normally paint on ( Arches) So, I grabbed a piece of Arches cold press and Daniel Smith watercolors with table salt.

the first round of paint looked like this (wet with salt on) 

My horizon of trees are a little high up the page but, I am assuming I can still make it work bring the main tree in closer to me. (if the salt works) 
 

At 2 am I could not sleep through the smoke rolling through the windows. ( we have forest fires burning south, west and east of the valley I live in (not close to us we are safe here just the air gets trapped in valleys along the base of mountain ranges frequently) So, I got up closed all the windows peeked at the dried painting above and decided to put a whole second layer of water over that and try it again. 

 At 6:30 am this is what the second layers of paints and salts dried to look like. not much Wow factor going on, figured its cotton paper... wet it again, so I did this is round 3 of paints and salts wet.

We'll see what it looks like when I get home from work today, I have a feeling you could do this 50 times before you start getting a consistency to your water/paint level that allows it to fracture like hers did. I have had success with this in the past with snow paintings ( during the winter when its cooler and we have some humidity so, now I am in wait and see mode.) 
 

So, this is how it dried when I brushed the salt off again after work today and I decided I did not have time to mess with trying different papers or brands of paint and I would just keep using this sheet. the salt fractures are not even remotely as dramatic as what is shown in the video and maybe it was the paint. I have no clue, probably there was also a water quantity amount issues as well. 

 

So I added some water to the ground area and some paint and walked away. I did try to get the horizon line a little darker than the foreground as I am thinking there should be shadows in those areas. We shall see how that translates when its dry. 

 After that layer was dry I did add some branches, a trunk and a few sprigs of grass here and there to the scene. 

 So where I stopped with a few more (taller grass) towards the bottom and a few more branches. The colors did not photograph that well as this is not quite so Pink its more of a coral shade in real life. I guess its not too bad for a first trial but, I just ran out of time to make a bunch of them to get a really dramatic Salted tree here. That's about it from me, if you'd like to play along with us you can find this challenge here at SCS. Thanks for stopping by.