Try colouring up your ideas

Pictures at an exhibition, a major piano piece by Modest Mussorgsky, is much better known as an orchestral piece arranged by Maurice Ravel. Ravel uses a large orchestra to imbue the music with rich and colourful sounds that the ear can luxuriate in and enjoy. The laborious plodding of low strings brings the painfully slow progress of a heavily burdened ox to vivid, sweaty life. The bright, glowing, long-arching phrases of the brass create the grandness of a noble procession through the Great Gate of Kiev. The melancholy, slowly floating melody of a bassoon brings a medieval castle into misty, nostalgic view.

How, like Ravel’s depiction of the ox, can you bring your ideas to vivid, steaming life? What memorable colour can you add to them? What powerful images, phrases, stories or models would add to their impact?

Colour up your ideas and increase their power and influence.