An interesting evening trying to paint in the style of Modigliani. He drew long faces, long thin noses, small blank eyes and a tiny mouth. This didn’t lend itself to flattering self portraits which caused great hilarity. We welcomed a new young member called Isaac Cook, who did a modern take on the style and shows great promise. Many thanks to Frank Bingley for leading this meeting, a huge success..

Peter, who has a gallery in Uppingham, had recently been to the Lake District. He took a photo of the River Derwent just as the sun broke through, giving lovely highlights. This was the subject for our demonstration. He worked on MDF board which had four coats of acrylic gesso primer in place. Peter worked with a very limited palette of burnt sienna, ultramarine blue, scarlet lake, cadmium yellow and Griffin Alkyd white. He mixed the paint with Liquin to speed up the drying time. He started by painting the darkest colours, mainly along the riverbank then did the cooler shades of the background. After adding light green highlights to the hills he put in the sky. For this he used a soft grey mixed from the blue, red and yellow, then white clouds gently blended in round the edges. Sky complete, Peter moved on to the left hand bank of trees on the hill, small strokes with a small brush gave good texture. More blue on the distant hill made it receded. Next came the trees along the riverbank then. Using dark greens and lighter highlights with a fat fan brush they soon came to life. This process was rather slow so with only twenty minutes to go the left hand bank was quickly and loosely painted. Then finally the part we had all been waiting for, the river! Reflections of the sky were painted in the foreground, the tree reflections next using vertical strokes. With only minutes to go the water was made to look wetter with a few horizontal strokes of white. Not quite finished, but absolutely amazing for just two hours work.
Thank you Peter for an informative and fascinating evening..

We had a lovely messy night making collage pictures. Not as much chatting as usual early on in the evening as everyone was concentrating on their work. By coffee break there were more cuttings, pieces of string, net and glue on the tables than on the pictures! Everyone relaxed after a ‘cuppa and biscuit’ and by 9.15, with the tables as good as new, we had produced some lovely pieces. We welcomed our newest member, Carol Barnard, from Gumley.

An unusual subject for May’s meeting, "Upside Down Painting". Our chairman, Michael Edwards, led the session and made it look so easy! We each were given a photograph and had to paint what we saw when it was turned the wrong way up. Michael said start by painting the shapes and colours that you see and then fill in the details. His demo picture looked amazing but most of us found it quite hard to ignore the image and just paint what we saw, especially as there was a twenty minute time limit on each painting. By coffee break and having completed two works most were getting the hang of it. Some just couldn’t get their heads around it, myself included. Too far out of their comfort zone but some very good work was done by the majority. We had a really good turnout with tables and chairs at full capacity. We welcomed new member Jan to the meeting and Sally has confirmed that we now have thirty five members in total. That is excellent news for the bank balance and it is lovely that most people rejoined the club after the AGM ( our official end of the annual subscription).