Salt, lifting, and other cheap texture tricks
Okay. You've got the rhythm down, you've got glazing, you've got edges figured out on purpose instead of by accident. This lesson is the fun one. It's also the one where I tell you to dump salt on your painting and mean it.
Texture tricks are cheap in two ways. They're cheap on materials — salt, a paper towel, the handle end of your brush. And they're cheap in the sense of "quick payoff." You do one weird thing to a wet wash and it looks like you know something. Sometimes you do.
Salt
Table salt or coarse salt, whatever's in your cupboard. I keep a jar of the coarse kind in my kit specifically for this.
Here's what's happening: you lay down a wash while it's still wet — not soaking, but wet, shiny-looking — and you sprinkle salt into it. The salt grains suck up the water around them and push the pigment away, and you get these little starburst blooms once it dries. Skies, foliage, rock texture, anything you want a little broken-up instead of flat.
Steps:
- Paint your wash. Any color, any size patch.
- Watch it. You want the shine to just start dulling, not gone. Too wet and the salt does nothing, it just dissolves into a blob. Too dry and it does nothing either, it just sits there like salt on a table.
- Sprinkle it on. Light hand. I mean it.
- Walk away. Let it dry completely — do not touch it, do not "check" it. Out here that's usually fifteen, twenty minutes depending on how much water you used.
- Brush the dried salt off with your fingers or a dry brush.
Here's my confession on this one. First time I tried it, I'd watched some video of somebody doing salt on a sunset sky and it looked gorgeous, so I figured more salt equals more gorgeous. I dumped basically the whole jar onto a wash I was pretty happy with. It looked like a snowstorm hit. Not "textured sky" — actual blizzard. Wrong call for that painting, completely wrong, but I still keep salt in my kit because when it's right, it's really right. Light hand. Learn from me.
Lifting
Lifting is just: take pigment back out with a damp, mostly-dry brush or a paper towel. You dab, you don't scrub.
Two situations where this is your friend:
Wet lifting — while the wash is still wet, press a crumpled paper towel into it. Instant clouds. Genuinely, this is how I do most of my clouds. Dab, lift, done. Don't drag the towel, just press and pull straight up.
Dry lifting — after everything's dried, wet a clean brush with plain water, no pigment, scrub gently at a spot, then blot with a paper towel or tissue. This is how you get back a highlight you should've saved with masking fluid and didn't. Works better on cheap student paper than you'd think, and better on rough or cold-press paper than smooth. Some pigments lift clean, some stain and won't budge — you'll learn which is which by doing it, there's no shortcut list I trust enough to hand you.
Real caution here, not a big one: don't scrub hard on cheap paper. The surface is thinner and it'll pill up on you, little gray eraser-shaving bits of paper fiber, and once that happens the spot is trashed. Gentle pressure. Let the water do the work, not your arm.
The handle trick
Turn your brush around. The pointy wood end, or your fingernail even, dragged through wet paint, scrapes pigment away and leaves a light line. Grass blades, branches, cracks in rock. Costs nothing, works instantly, and it's the trick I use the most out of everything in this lesson because it's just... there, built into the brush you already own.
An opinion, while we're here
You do not need a texture kit. I see student sets that come with sponges and combs and little stamp things and stencils and I think it's mostly stuff to make you feel like you need more stuff. Salt from your kitchen, a paper towel from the roll, the back end of a brush you already own. That's the whole kit. Save your money for paper, which you'll go through a lot faster than you think.
Storage note, because it matters more than people think
Once these are dry, store them flat if you can, not rolled, not stuffed in a folder at an angle. I had a painting — the second one I was ever proud of, back when I was newer at this than you are now — that I stuck flat in a drawer and completely forgot about. Found it four months later doing some other cleanout and it was still good. I actually liked it more with some distance from it. That doesn't happen with most of my projects, so it stuck with me. Flat storage is part of why it survived to be rediscovered instead of creased in a pile somewhere.
Before next time
Try one wash with salt and one with wet-lifted paper towel clouds, same painting or different ones, doesn't matter. See which one you reach for again without me telling you to.