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“Colour is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.” – Claude Monet.

In this free workshop, textile designer Maria Cooper will help you develop your use of colour  by sharing her knowledge and experience from working in industry for the last 15 years with designers including Zandra Rhodes and Orla Kiely.

Over the course of this one-day workshop Maria will:

• Introduce you to colour palettes she has created in the past and demonstrate various ways she works with colour in development of her own work
• Help you translate colour within your work to other people and develop accurate use of colour through learning about colour systems that are used in industry (for example Pantone, RAL, and ColourAid)
• Help you create your own colour palettes using beautiful images and discuss other ways colour palettes can be formed from favourite/found objects or from nature etc
• Talk about her own work and share insights into how she has generated income from her art

Maria is a Textile designer from Durham. She graduated from Cleveland college of Art & design in 2004 with a B.A. in Surface Textile design, she then went on to study an M.A. in printed textiles at the Royal college of Art graduating in 2007. For the following 15 years Maria has worked full time in industry for H&M, Zandra Rhodes and Orla Kiely. She moved back to Durham in 2019 and is currently developing her own practice in her studio at Ushaw College. Maria works across Fabric, Paper and Paper Mache. Maria loves colourful, joyous design. At this moment her main influences are, the post-modern design collective Memphis, Art deco, motifs from nature, Josef Frank and Dorothy Draper.

The workshop is free. Refreshments, lunch and the materials required to create your colour palettes will be provided.