President Lynda White launches the 2016 season at Thomas Whitty House

Axminster Art Society began its 2016 season in a new home at Thomas Whitty House.

President Lynda White launched the programme with a demonstration before a packed audience. She showed them how colour glazes enhance paintings, featuring pictures from previous centuries up to modern examples where layered papers and other materials created an almost abstract image. She reminded the gathering of her president’s challenge - to create postcard-sized pictures to be sold at the summer exhibition in the Axe Vale Festival - as this was an ideal technique for the project.

Working from a tomato and two apricots on 300gm watercolour Waterford paper, she used a fluid acrylic paint made by Golden, an American company, and their glazing liquid medium which acts as a binder, preventing paint run-off or streaking.

Lynda washed a thin layer of cadmium yellow across her paper, adding small touches of red to the fruit, and whilst this dried, showed members vegetable prints on bands of colour, glazed with a red or yellow paint or diluted ink to create secondary colours - greens or purples.

She advised members to experiment with their own paints rather than following advice from books as colours vary between brands, and a chart of colours covered with translucent shades showed how glazes of harmonious colours - those beside each other on the colour wheel – enhance colour, while opposing colours dilute it.

On the dry tomato picture, Lynda washed red-orange glaze over the fruit, adding magenta red as shadows and building up layers using blue to emphasise contours.

White highlights were added separately without inclusion in the paint mix, which would dull the translucency.

At the next meeting, on February 17, Stephen Foster demonstrates landscape painting with a palette knife. Visitors are welcome (£5).

For further details, contact Anthea Bareham on 01460 221088.