After-School Club: Salt Paintings

Last week at our library's after-school club we did a neat project that only requires thick-ish white paper or watercolor paper (card stock works--anything at least a little thicker than printer paper), white glue, salt, a 9x12 baking dish, watercolors, and paintbrushes. The kids really seemed to enjoy the weirdness of sprinkling salt all over glue and observing what the paint does with this mixture. They even wanted to do it again this week!

Here are our finished works of art adorning the wall of the kids' room:

Salt Painting Instructions:

-drizzle glue on a piece of thick paper to create a design--can be a picture or just abstract shapes, but thicker glue will spread, so keep lines fairly thin unless you don't mind the glue running together.

-lay the sheet of paper in the baking dish and sprinkle it with salt. Tap off the excess salt.

-paint into the salt-covered glue lines (nope, the glue doesn't need to dry!). The salt makes the paint spread in interesting ways, creating neat color-blending effects and cool patterns. This is especially noticeable once the paintings are totally dry (at least 24 hours) and all the extra salt can be rubbed off of the glue lines.

-it's as easy as that! Have fun experimenting with different effects--you can either keep the paint neatly on the glue lines or spread it around and just pool up around the glue.