My love of Watercolors

I used to paint with watercolors in high school and am getting back into it. I forgot how much I love it. It's amazing how similar it is to dyeing - they are both transparent mediums (which can become opaque in special situations). That's probably why I gravitated to dyeing. One day, I was experimenting with dye on raw silk. I remembered a technique from a middle school art teacher where if salt is layered on top of watercolor paint, it creates really interesting sunburst effects after it drys. Perhaps it could work on fabric? So I tried:

watercolor-1I put salt over some of the purple dye to see if it would help it to spread. Instead (and I'm hoping you can see this in the picture) it helped set the color of the purple dye. The areas on the left and bottom (the deeper plum color) had salt on them, and the area on the top right (lighter lavender) did not. Interesting.... more on this salt thing later.