smARTworks Tea Party 21 - Pass the Salt!

This was a fun challenge! Donelda asked us to use the salt technique somewhere on our cards. Believe it or not, I had never tried the technique before. Well, it turns out that it's wicked fun! Just create a wet wash with your choice of watercolor media (I used watercolor crayons), drop grains of salt into the wet paint and let it dry. Magic! I was having so much fun that I made 10 backgrounds before I knew it!

Here are the cards I made with two of them. The first one incorporates my latest addiction--Inchies. I stamped the butterflies (Inchie Blocks - Set 4) with Chestnut Roan chalk ink onto a piece of leftover piece from a watercolor wash I had hanging around and colored them with Prismacolor pencils. I cut out my squares and mounted them onto white Inchie Squares and covered the edges with more brown ink. For the background piece, I did a wash with shades of brown and yellow. The paint had dried a tad too much before I added the salt, but I still liked the effect, so here it is. The sentiment I used is from the Indigo Bunting set.

The second card I made was completely inspired by the background, which reminded me of a star galaxy. For this background, I blobbed three different colors onto a really wet piece of watercolor paper and added the salt while everything was still quite wet. Keeping with the swirly star galaxy theme, I chose a flower from the Star Flowers set and colored it with Copic markers. The center of the flower is a round paperclip attached with a large round glue dot. After I attached the clip, I sprinkled on micro beads to cover the exposed adhesive. It's much prettier IRL!

Susan, Dina, Donelda, and Giovana are joining the party this week, too, so be sure check out what they did. This was a fun challenge, and unfortunately, it's the last one for a bit. The Design Team has decided to take the summer off, but don't worry...we'll be back! In the meantime, we'll be participating in other challenges, and of course, we'll be posting on our blogs.