Squint until the colour goes away
Here is a test that takes two seconds and will tell you more about your A1 than an hour of staring. Step back and squint at the page until the colours blur into grey masses. Whatever survives — the arrangement of light and dark, the shape the whole thing makes — is your composition. If it falls apart when the colour goes, no amount of beautiful colour was ever going to save it.
Colour is loud and composition is quiet
This is why the mistake is so persistent. Colour announces itself. You can see immediately whether a colour is nice, and it feels like the thing you are being judged on, so it gets the attention.
Composition does not announce itself. A badly composed page does not look wrong in any obvious way — it just fails to hold you, and you cannot say why. Which means candidates finish an A1 that is dead on the page, feel reasonably good about it because the colours were pleasant, and never diagnose the actual problem.
The squint test exists precisely because it strips the loud thing away and forces the quiet thing into view. Do it constantly. Do it before you commit to colour at all, on the pencil layout. Do it halfway through. Do it at the end, when there is still time to fix something.
The three decisions that make a composition
Under the squint, only three things are really visible, and they are the three decisions worth making before you touch colour.
Where the eye lands first. Something must dominate — same principle as A3, in two dimensions. Highest contrast usually wins, which means the focal point is decided by value, not by hue. A brilliant red does nothing if it sits at the same lightness as everything around it.
How the page is divided. The big masses. Where the horizon sits, how the ground meets the sky, what proportion of the page is occupied and what is left open. Most dead compositions are dead because everything is centred and evenly distributed, which is the two-dimensional version of the six-equal-blocks problem.
Where the eye goes next. A composition is a route, not a snapshot. From the focal point, something should carry you — a line, a repetition, a run of similar values — and eventually bring you back rather than walking you off the edge.
That is it. Three decisions, all makeable in pencil in ninety seconds, all invisible in the finished piece, and all worth more than every colour choice you will make afterwards.
Value does the work that hue gets the credit for
The single most useful piece of colour theory for A1 is barely about colour: value carries the composition; hue carries the mood.
Value is how light or dark something is. Hue is what colour it is. They are independent, and candidates routinely conflate them — which produces the classic failure of a page full of energetic colour that reads as flat grey mush from three metres away, because every colour on it is at the same value.
Get the values right and you can be surprisingly careless with hue and still be fine. Get the values wrong and no hue rescues it. This is why the squint test works: squinting throws away hue and shows you value, which is the layer that was doing the structural work all along.
If you take one habit from this module, take this: plan in three values before you plan in colour. Dark, mid, light. Where are the darks? Do they group into a shape, or are they scattered as confetti? A composition whose darks group is already most of the way to working.
The rules behind this
Sourced to the official brochure rather than restated here, so there is one place to correct when the Council revises it.
Part A is three questions: A1 Composition and Colour (25), A2 Sketching and Composition in Black and White (25), A3 3D Composition (30).
Eighty marks across three questions means each is worth roughly 13% of the whole exam. There is no salvaging a bad question by volume, the way a 50-question paper allows.
Source · verified 2026-07-16
What almost everyone believes
“A1 is a colour question, so the marks are mostly about using colour well.”
It is titled Composition and Colour, in that order, and the composition is what fails when candidates lose marks.
Colour is loud and self-evidently judgeable, so it absorbs attention; composition is quiet and its failures are diffuse — a page that simply does not hold you, for reasons you cannot name. That asymmetry means candidates finish a dead composition feeling reasonably good because the colours were pleasant. Worse, the instinct when something feels flat is to reach for a brighter hue, which cannot fix a value problem and often deepens it. The whole paper rewards visual decision-making over craft; A1 is not the exception.
Depending on how long you have
Foundation
Understand the skill. Months out, or starting from zero.
Spend a month working only in greyscale — pencil, nothing else. It sounds like a detour and it is the fastest route. Without hue to hide behind, you are forced to build compositions that work on value alone, and that skill transfers completely and permanently to colour. Almost nobody does this, which is part of why it works.
Drill
The practice protocol. What to repeat, how often, how to score it.
Before any colour goes down, do a thumbnail: a small three-value sketch of the whole composition, thirty seconds, no detail. If the thumbnail does not read, the finished piece will not either, and you have found out for the cost of thirty seconds instead of twenty-five minutes. Photograph your finished work in black and white and judge it there.
Exam-Day
What to actually do under the constraint — 108 seconds, no instruments, one pass.
Ninety seconds in pencil deciding focal point, division and route. Squint at it. Only then reach for colour, and squint again at the halfway mark while there is still time to rescue something. If the page dies under the squint, fix the values — do not reach for a brighter colour, which is the instinct and never works.
Try it
Twenty minutes, and the last step is the one that teaches.
- 01Take any A1 attempt you have already finished, or make one now.
- 02Photograph it, then convert the photo to black and white on your phone.
- 03Look at the greyscale version. Where does your eye land? Does anything dominate, or is it uniform mush?
- 04If it is mush, your composition was carried entirely by hue — which means it was not carried at all.
- 05Redo it from a three-value thumbnail: darks grouped, one clear focal point, then colour on top. Compare the two greyscale photographs.
The short version
Squint until the colour disappears and what remains is what is being marked. Value carries composition; hue carries mood, and conflating them produces energetic pages that read as flat grey from three metres. Make three decisions in pencil before any colour — where the eye lands, how the page divides, where the eye goes next — and group your darks. When a page feels dead, fix the values; reaching for a brighter colour is the instinct and it has never once worked.
Next: dry media specifically — what pencils, crayons and pastels will and will not do for you under time.
Questions people actually ask
- Is NATA A1 marked on colour or composition?
- No marking criteria are published, so nobody can tell you the split. What is known is the title — Composition and Colour, in that order — and that the whole paper consistently rewards visual decision-making over craft. Composition is also where candidates reliably fail, because its failures are quiet while colour failures are obvious.
- What is the squint test?
- Step back and squint at your page until the colours blur into grey masses. It strips out hue and shows you value — the layer doing the structural work. If the composition falls apart under the squint, it was being carried by colour alone, and no amount of good colour will save it.
- Why does my drawing look flat even though the colours are bright?
- Almost always because every colour on the page sits at the same value. Value is lightness; hue is which colour it is, and they are independent. A page of energetic hues all at mid-value reads as uniform grey from a distance. The fix is to group your darks and open up a genuine light — not to reach for a brighter colour.