The local art center has a working artist as their gallery director. Discovering her talents in high school, the hempfield township resident majored in art at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and has been active at the art club since 1970. The art center has regular exhibitions of her work. According to her, her areas of expertise are oils, pastels and silk screen printing.

She demonstrated landscape pastel painting from a photograph when she was invited by another art club. Her view is that beginners should not limit their work only to photographs. The nuances of light and shadow should be experienced by everyone is her recommendation.

She says that when you work outside, you can absorb the details, sketch the actual scene, take a photograph, and refer to it later. This is normally done by her. She also draws composite landscapes using several photographs. This technique becomes very useful when the customer asks for elements that aren't present in just one photograph.

When using photographs as a reference to painting a picture, the painter can adjust the final image to his own liking. It should be decided by you as to what becomes the most important part of the painting. Deciding how a painting would look when completed can be decided by using a photograph, although she normally does not do that.

She paints a pastel portrait while explaining her technique from an enlarged photocopy of a photo that was clicked during the fall at Slippery Rock. She says that she doesn't draw all the way to the edges of the paper, so nothing is covered by the frame. Layering colour becomes possible by painting on the wrong side of the pastel sheet.

She utilizes blue and reds to evoke the shades of dark logs and branches that rise from the water. By adding bits of red not visible on the photograph she is able to put emphasis on certain parts of her painting. Her exploitation of the fact is careful that pastels are as close as an artist can get to using pure pigment.

She says that sometimes, you have to stop and think about your color values. It is best not to use too much light too soon. Conserving the white areas is not important like in watercolors and lighter shades can be layered on the darker ones when painting with pastels. You just need to feel your way around pastels.

Special care should be paid to the color range. Without mixing a lot of shades we can still get the right color because of the wide range of color that is available today. If you aren't satisfied with the result, you can comfortably wipe the color off and start over again while painting with pastels. It is a simpler medium.