Rebecca De Mendoca shows how to create rocks, water and trees

Lyme Regis Art Society enjoyed a demonstration of pastel painting by Rebecca De Mendoca.

The talented artist trained in theatre design, working with several well-known figures, before concentrating on her own work, teaching and running courses.

She brought a depiction of rocks on Dartmoor, created with a wash of blue paint over primed paper with the rough finish best suited to pastel work.

She often paints over old pictures prewashed with water then dried, or mixes paint into the basic primer to start with a coloured base.

Originally working in monochrome, landscape painting showed her that colour is essential to create depth and space. She visits the area she wants to paint to sketch and photograph taking easily-carried boxes of warm or cool colours from her range of unison pastels.

For her Lyme Regis demonstration, charcoal lines added deeper pools of shadow and the suggestion of cracks and crevices, often making strokes of different colours as a way of blending and she twists and turns the edges of the pastel to create harder lines for finer definition.

Rebecca finds that an Airforce shade of blue-grey is a good choice for features in the middle distance and “knocks back” greens there with blues.

She scrumbled in shades of green around the foreground with flecks of orange suggesting dried grasses and any loose pastel bits were scraped off with a very thin plastic card.

Her pictures are double mounted with the smaller mount inside, next to the painting , so any dust falls down between the two mounts.

After tea, members were shown various ways of creating tree shapes and of methods of painting images of water.

Rebecca has a very lively and humourous style of demonstration so the group not only had a very informative afternoon, but also a very entertaining couple of hours.

Lyme Regis Art Society meets on alternate Tuesdays in The Woodmead Halls from 2pm to 4pm until the end of March. Its next meeting will be on November 6 with a demonstration by Simon Bramble entitled Folk Art in Oils, Acrylics and Watercolours. Visitors and new members are always welcome. For further details, contact Sheila Stratton on 01297 445464 or go to www.lymeregisartssociety.org.uk