Unit X: Colour Workshop with Leigh Cooke

So far on the course I have resisted from using colour in my work. I would love to be able to get away with the (perfectly valid) excuse that a muted colour palette is part of my artistic sensibilities but if truth be told I am simply terrified of colour! In the past, I have enjoyed working with colour and print but this year my focus has shifted towards design in terms of construction and shape-making. When it comes to bringing the two elements of my practice together I find that I am completely lost.

So today was a bit of a challenge for me as we had a colour workshop with Leigh Cooke, a print designer for Hermes scarves. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect but Robin insisted that it would benefit Fashion students. As a general rule, anything with the Robin seal of approval is probably worth giving a chance!

I was running a little late this morning as I had chosen 10 minutes before the workshop to start gathering my equipment (God help me next year when I no longer have the luxury of living just 2 minutes away from campus!). I’m too much of a ‘goody-two-shoes’ to have a blasé attitude to turning up to lectures late so was a little afraid that I would upset the designer of such a high profile fashion brand. I suppose it’s a sign of my naivety that every time we have a guest lecturer I immediately assume that they will have the demeanor of Miranda Priestly from ‘The Devil Wears Prada’. But I was pleasantly surprised to meet Leigh as he was very engaging and friendly from the start.

The task on hand was to use a postcard size image of our choosing and to pick out individual colours from its overall composition. Once we were confident with the colours we had extracted, we could start to play around with ratios of each colour to see how they would look together. As we worked, Leigh Cook spoke to us about how he would use this process as part of his degree and even now in his current profession in order to come up with original colour schemes.

Initially, I found the workshop rather therapeutic and could certainly see myself trying out the technique again in my spare time. But after a while, despite Leigh’s encouragement, I started to get a bit frustrated with myself as the colour scheme I had picked out just didn’t look ‘right’! To be fair, he did explain that as a textile student he would have to repeat this process many times. So really, it’s no wonder that my work showed no resemblance to the examples he showed us at the beginning of the session.

Overall, Leigh Cooke was a joy to work with and was clearly very passionate about what he does.  I think the workshop was a great introduction to a new way of working and I intend to keep developing this in my future work. Who knows, I might actually take the leap and add a splash of colour to my next project!