NICK Watton presented a Sketching Demonstration to members of Newton St Cyres Art Group at the meeting held on Wednesday, June 28.

Nick is a versatile artist with a long and successful art career.

As well as designing and illustrating stamps, he paints a wide range of subjects including landscapes, people, boats and wildlife, in a variety of media.

Sketching has been his passion since schooldays, and he recommended we try sketching as often as possible, wherever we find ourselves, and experiment with different media.

After showing us the materials he takes on sketching trips, he demonstrated two very different methods: a quick watercolour, and a very small oil painting.

The first took 15 minutes, the second about an hour.

We enjoyed browsing through the sketchbooks he brought and marvelled at his skills.

As he said, the benefits of sketching are: less pressure to produce a masterpiece, spontaneity and freshness, and a better memory of the scene after having really observed and absorbed it, if you want to produce a painting from it.

Jenny Hallam