Negative space drawing

Negative space drawing is the process of drawing the space around an object instead of drawing the object itself. Focusing on the shape of the negative space when drawing can help make the shape of the object itself (which is the positive space) more accurate, and it is a good exercise in observation. We did two negative space drawings, the leaf drawing and the stool still life. For the leaf drawing we went outside and collected some interesting looking leaves, then we made a border on a piece of paper and traced the leaves, keeping them inside the border. The outlines of the leaves were the positive space so we used colored pencils to fill on the negative space that was inside the border, this was also an opportunity to practice working with colored pencils. We used colors that we saw in the leaves to color in the negative space. For the stool still life there were some stools set up on top of a desk in the middle of the room. We drew a border on the paper again and used view finders to look at just the part of the stool setup that we wanted to draw. Then we only looked at the shapes of the negative space around the stools and drew just those and not the details of the stools themselves, this ended up making the outline of the stools. Then we had to fill in the negative space again in whatever way we wanted, I chose to fill in the different parts of the negative space with different patterns of things I found interesting or fun to draw. I did eyes, raindrops, flowers, fried eggs, and many other things using markers. Then in the biggest space I drew some hot air balloons and used a blue water color pencil to outline the shape of the negative space.