Please pass the salt

My watercolour pencil class has been continuing, and we've been learning different techniques.  Most recently it was "wet on wet", and our subject was this cactus. (Wouldn't be my first choice of subject matter.)

To start off, we transfer the image to our paper (scribble on the back of a photocopy then trace the outline of the image to our watercolour paper (140 pound cold press).  Once that's done, we use masking fluid with a teeny tiny brush to cover all the white areas of the cactus (dots on the flowers, needles on the leaves, etc).

Then, using a 1" brush, we wet the bulbs and the leaves.  In this wet area we paint a wash of yellow on the leaves and orange on the bulbs (to give it a sense of sunlight) and dry it with the trusty blowdryer.  We get the "paint" from the pencils which are grated using a tea strainer, and mixed with a small amount of water.

Then we wet the sky and paint it blue, orange and 3 shades of green in a freeform sort of way.

Here's where the salt comes in.  Sprinkling salt onto wet paint results in a textured effect and different types of salt yields different results.

Kosher salt on the left and table salt on the right

We're using salt to give our sky some texture, so we sprinkle salt all over the sky and let it dry naturally. Then it can be brushed off.

The next tricky part is to use our pencils to lightly draw colour onto the buds.  We shade the buds with an orangy-red, then a red, and finally a blue (for the shadows).  Once that's done, we use a damp brush to wet the colour, and hopefully blend the paint so it looks sort of natural.  That was the most difficult part for me - I think it requires quite a bit of practise to make the blending look natural.  Once the buds are done, we do the same sort of thing on the leaves, then remove the masking fluid, and add the shadows.

Quite a bit of work ... but fun.  Here's my finished piece.  After all the time spent on it, I've actually become kind of fond of the subject matter.