Sera Knight Demonstration

Wet Pavement Painting in Mixed Media

Friday 3rd July 2026

Sera Knight is a professional local artist who has been a member of Frimley & Camberley Society of Arts for many years. She has won a good many prizes for her paintings at our Annual Exhibition. She works in watercolour, acrylic and mixed media. Sera is a member of the Society of Women Artists (SWA) and in fact spent much of last week at the Mall Galleries in London where the SWA were holding their annual exhibition.

Sera has developed a mixed media technique that works particularly well for wet pavements and streets and members had requested that she demonstrate one of these for us this evening. Sera began by showing everyone a quick sketch of what she was intending to paint. Looking at the sketch she said that she felt the telephone box was a bit dominant so she decided to fold back the reference photo so that it would intrude less.

Below is the reference photo Sera was using. She said that she liked the flags and the red bus in the background. She had drawn in some guidelines to help with establishing the perspective.

Sera said that she would start drawing with a Caran D’Ache Neo Colour II water-soluble crayon. She used red or brown because blue or green is too staining. The paper is Bockingford Watercolour Paper but this technique will work on canvas or board as well. It is not a good idea to use an expensive watercolour paper as it is going to be covered in paper and glue.

Sera began by sketching the telephone box and then deciding on the horizon line. She used a large set square to work out the perspective. Once she had lightly sketched in some guiding lines she started to cut up her magazine. She finds that Waitrose Food magazines work particularly well because of the quality of the paper they use.

It was time for Sera to get to work with her scissors and PVA glue. She could see that she was going to need quite a lot of red images. Sometimes she does just tear the pieces of paper she is going to use but by cutting she gets the straight edges she will need for the phone box and the bus.

Sera has been doing this type of mixed media painting since 2001. Initially it was luck and as she experimented she found it got better and she liked the result. Sera admitted the process of cutting and sticking is the time consuming and a bit boring.

Towards the end of the sticking process Sera used some crunched up tissue paper to put over the distant buildings to help to push them back in the image. She also likes the lines that are created by the tissue in the sky. She then painted over the tissue with lots of watered down PVA glue. She intends to use the coffee break to let the glue dry as ideally everything should be bone dry before she applies any paint.

Just before the break Sera used some acrylic ink to paint over the whole picture. Yellow was her colour of choice as it is a good unifying colour. After the break she began to paint in acrylic. She started with the red phone box and bus. She uses the same colours to paint the reflections in the pavement. Unfortunately she found that the paint was not gliding over the surface as it had not dried enough. The was being absorbed and appeared to be losing its colour.

When working in her studio Sera is able to let her work dry completely. She is also able to take breaks and look at the work afresh. This evening when she stood back to look at her painting she was not happy with the proportion of the bus. She was able to use acrylic paint to reduce it in size.

For the demonstration she needed to work quickly putting in the windows in the buildings, the red and white of the flags and working on the figures even deciding to remove an umbrella. She likes Titanium White for the coverage it gives. The last thing she painted was the wet pavement at the centre of the painting.

Sue Whitehead, the Chairman, thanked Sera for a fascinating demonstration. It was so interesting to see how Sera’s distinctive style of mixed media paintings were created. For more information about Sera and her art please see her website: http://www.seraknight.co.uk

Here is the end result that Sera has sent after she has defined it a bit more and cropped it. What vibrant colours!

Write up by Carole Head