Bridie Cheeseman's Composition Workshop

Today I took part in a Gouache workshop lead by Bridie Cheeseman which focused all around the composition of an image, focussing on the importance of tone and colour. She advised us to use primary colours and mix from those, as working with a limited palette makes your work more harmonious. She also explained how colour and tone and colour can isolate a focal point, such as using the colour blue, or areas of high contrast.

Bridie then gave us each a small photo of a bird, and then asked us to draw the image in greyscale, converting all colour to tone. She asked us to use only 3 greys, along with black and white.

She then showed us a colour scheme and told us to translate each of our grey tones into a specific colour. But there was a twist, we had to make each colour the same tone, so when viewed in greyscale the image is all the same tone. 

With our limited palette, we then had to paint imagery from our project. My colours were white, red, blue and yellow, which I had mixed to form other colours to enable me to create a good looking image.