REBECCA de Mendonca visited Newton St Cyres Art Club for a pastel demonstration on January 24.

Rebecca is a well-known local artist and demonstrator, specialising in paintings of horses as well as other animals, landscapes and portraits.

We were happy to welcome her again for a demonstration – this time, how to place figures realistically, in first a rural, then an urban scene.

She had to work fast to paint and impart knowledge at the same time, and kept our attention throughout.

She worked on mount card, primed to give the card a gritty surface, providing tooth for the pastel.

In her Dartmoor scene, she first painted the tor and rocks quite loosely with acrylic and charcoal or a black Conte crayon, before working with pastel from the sky down to the foreground.

She was careful to blend sky colour into distant land colour so the horizon was indistinct.

Careful attention was paid to tone, warm/cool colours, and saturation.

A colour swatch down the right side of the painting formed a useful reference.

A variety of marks added visual interest, and highlights were added last. The two figures were drawn with pastel pencil and she stressed the importance of grounding figures so that they don’t appear as floating or stuck on.

In the urban scene she explained the basic rules of perspective, and demonstrated how to establish the eye line and the vanishing point, using a setsquare, then added figures to show that most people’s heads tend to be on the eye line while their feet indicate their distance from the viewer.

Small details such as the tilt of a head, the angle of an arm or leg, and a highlight on some clothing, carry a lot of information about the way the person is moving and how they are feeling, even if the figure is quite small.

She suggested copying diagrams of skeletons in order to better understand the proportions of the human body.

We learned a lot from her lively, entertaining and informative demonstration.

Jenny Hallam