Choose a variety of colors to add details to your map.
Salt dough is an excellent resource for learning geography. With salt dough, students can create three dimensional maps that demonstrate the topography of an area. Forming the peaks, plains and waterways is only the beginning of making an eye-catching salt map. Once the salt is dry, paint your map to add the finishing touches to your project. Paint your salt map with a plan to increase it's accuracy and give it a realistic look.
Instructions
1. Paint your salt map's base before tracing the land areas and adding the salt dough. Corrugated cardboard is a strong enough base for a salt map, so you can use scraps of cardboard you might have around the house, like an old appliance box. Don't make your map too large so that it is hard to carry or fit through doors. The bottom part of a pizza box is an excellent base, large enough to make a detailed map but easy to carry.
2. Allow the base to dry, then proceed to trace the land areas and make your map on the painted base.Check your map to ensure the salt dough is completely dry before painting it. When your map is dry, it will be solid so that you can no longer make indents with your fingers or tools.
3. Refer to a relief map and decide how you wish to represent the areas on your map. For example, you may wish to choose colors based on the height above or below sea level, with darker colors representing the lowest lying areas and lighter colors representing higher areas. Water is traditionally represented with blue, the darker shades showing deeper water, while white might represent snow-capped mountain ranges that reach above 5,000 feet. Alternately, you may wish to select colors based on terrain, such as green for rain forests, yellow for deserts and brown for mountain regions.
4. Cover your work space with newspaper or old scrap plastic table cloths and give children smocks to protect their clothing. Pour small amounts of paint on a disposable Styrofoam plate or foil pie tin for a palette.
5. Paint the streams, paths and narrow or indented areas first. Use a liner brush or thin brush. Dip your brush in water if your paint is thick then stir the wet brush into the paint to thin it slightly. This will help the paint to spread more fluidly. Allow it to dry.
6. Color in the large land areas with paint, followed by the mountain regions and large bodies of water. There is no need to wet the brush or water the paint down to paint over the large areas. Let the base colors dry.
7. Dry-brush darker or lighter colors for additional shading and highlights to give your map more depth and detail. For the dry brush technique, put a dry paint brush into a tiny drop of paint, then brush the bristles back and forth on a paper towel a few times until most of the color comes off. Once the color is coming out faint on the paper towel, brush it over the areas of salt dough on top of the base color. This will create subtle shadows and highlights.
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