Memory Drawing and Composition
What this domain tests
Memory drawing gives you a written theme - a rainy day, a market, a village fair, a playground - and asks for a composed colour picture made from recall. Marks go to composition, human figures in action, and a readable story, not to photographic accuracy.
Core rules
- Choose one incident. A single clear event beats a crowded list. Decide who is doing what, where the eye should land, and cut everything that does not support it.
- Place the focal point off-centre, near a third line, and give it the strongest contrast and the sharpest detail.
- Build depth with three layers. Dark foreground silhouettes (a tree, a cycle, a doorway), the main action in the middle, simplified light shapes behind.
- Simplify people into gesture blocks - head, ribcage, pelvis, limbs - then dress them. Keep one light direction across the whole scene so figures and shadows agree.
- Limit the palette to a dominant family plus one accent; grey down the background so the subject separates.
Worked example
Theme: rainy day. Put a boy under an umbrella at the right third, his umbrella a dark shape against a pale grey sky. Show the rain as slanting strokes in one direction only. Add reflections under his feet and two greyed-out figures further back, smaller and lower in contrast. Keep the road, sky and figures in cool greys with one warm accent - a yellow raincoat.
Traps that cost marks
A crowd with no focal point; figures in a straight row at the same size and eye level; people floating without shadows or ground contact; an empty sky or empty corners; colours that clash because each object is given a different bright hue; and detail spread evenly so nothing stands out.