MEMBERS of Newton St Cyres Art Club welcomed Rachel Toll to their January meeting when she gave a watercolour demonstration.

As an untrained, self-taught artist Rachel is now well-known internationally for her beautiful wildlife paintings, which have been widely exhibited and often sold at major wildlife charity fundraising events.

Locally, Lympstone Manor commissioned a great many paintings from her. We admired her skill as we browsed the cards and paintings she had brought, and her website is definitely worth a visit.

She demonstrated her technique on the view of a Devon lane, flanked by hedges and tall trees, with shadows and dappled sunlight, not to mention masses of foliage; a daunting challenge.

She worked from a photo she had taken and had already sketched in areas she needed to differentiate.

Then she combined loose, random wet-in-wet work with fine detail, sometimes with a dry brush, moving the painting around to encourage the water and pigments to flow and merge.

Using extremely fine brushes, she showed us how to drop pigments onto the wet paper and manipulate them very carefully, layer on layer, to produce the effect of foliage, being sure to make the dark areas really dark.

The final touch - a spattering of white acrylic – brought the painting together with a sparkle.

We look forward to attending her workshop in March.

Jenny Hallam