Daring to paint a view well known to her audience, Axminster artist Lynda White proved her bravery twice over.

She had been asked to stand in at short notice when the demonstrator booked by Seaton and District Art Society for the first meeting of the year at Seaton Town Hall could not make it.

Lynda admitted to being nervous about tackling the lovely view on the walk from Beer Head to Seaton, with a tangle of Old Man’s Beard and brambles in the foreground.

Using her own photograph as a guide, the resulting painting was spontaneously cheered by the members, proving that her nerves were unnecessary.

Working on a green-grey mount board primed with a clear, waterproofing gesso, which gives a tooth for pastels, Lynda used Golden Fluid acrylics and acrylic inks for the under painting.

She used a ‘great big flat brush’ and urged members to ‘use your arm’. The underpainting included lots of white and ‘teeny weenie’ spots of colour to conjure the glassy, quiet sea of a wintry afternoon.

With the pastels she painted a muted green field at the top of the mauvey white cliffs and suggested her audience paint them not as Beer cliffs but as shapes in a muted, shadowy tone.

“It helps to have a lot of pastels,” she said, and later moved on to pastel pencils – ‘horrible to sharpen’ - for the wispy bits of stem and to catch the character of the twigs in the foreground. However, she told members to ‘beware of getting carried away making enjoyable marks and doing too much – work on another part of the picture’.

The society’s new chairman, Geoff Mitchell, thanked Lynda for getting the year off to an excellent start.