Artist painted a landscape the Chinese way, capturing the foreground first and then adding background details.

A demonstration of Chinese landscape painting, freehand style, showed the Sidmouth Society of Artists a very different and thought-provoking method of capturing a scene.

Committee member Ann England said the precision used by Kaili Fu ‘really held the audience’.

Kaili explained that with this method of painting, the foreground is painted first, followed by the middle and then the background, unlike the Western way of painting.

She began with a tree in the traditional Chinese way using a large fairly stiff paint brush with a definite point, black ink on rice paper.

As the painting progressed, a lighter shade of black ink was used.

Kaili then changed to a softer brush with a paint similar to watercolour, but with a different ingredient, for the wash.

For the second half, the Society of Artists were shown traditional bamboo painting.

Ann said: “One very important point was that one cannot afford to make any mistakes at all! How would we manage that?”