Painting birds in pastel with Karen Davies

On 1 March Karen visited us to talk about pastel techniques in general, and gave a demonstration of the first stages of painting a lapwing.

Karen works mostly on paper, white and tinted, but also showed us a striking image made on slate. She prefers to start at the top of a picture and work downwards, to avoid smudging the lower parts. To fix intermediate stages she uses hair spray, which is much cheaper than  pastel sprays. One unexpected technique was to spray cooking oil lightly over parts of the pastel to increase density of tone.

Members of the Group pastelling (and chatting)

In her demonstration she showed how to use photographic references culled from magazines, but pointed out that slavishly copying from a copyrighted image was bad form and probably illegal – one should construct ones own picture.

The early stages of Karen's demonstration picture

Note added 25 April: You can see some pictures of birds made by members by clicking on the "Galleries" tab above.