ART lovers were treated to a special demonstration of pastel painting.

Members of Lyme Regis Art Society welcomed artist Rebecca de Mendonca to their latest session.

Rebecca, a pastel artist based near Exeter, trained in theatre design before concentrating on her own work teaching and running courses.

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

She often paints over old pictures pre-washed with water then dried, or mixes paint into the basic primer to start with a coloured base and visits the area she wants to paint to sketch and photograph.

Rebecca showed the group how charcoal lines added deeper pools of shadow and the suggestion of cracks and crevices in the rocks, making them stand out against a paler sky of blended blues and flesh tones nearer the horizon.

She chooses the more saturated tones of each colour and builds up several layers, often making strokes of different colours as a way of blending, turning the pastel to create harder lines for finer definition.

She demonstrated how she used shades of green around the foreground with flecks of orange, suggesting dried grasses, and scraping off any loose pastel bits with a thin plastic card.

The group was then shown various ways of creating tree shapes and methods of painting images of water.

Lyme Regis Art Society meets on alternative Tuesdays in The Woodmead Halls from 2pm to 4pm until the end of March.

Visitors and new members are always welcome.

For more information, contact Sheila Stratton on 01297 445464 or visit lymeregisartsociety.org.uk