negative space drawing

For my art assignment, I was assigned to do two negative space drawings. The first one I did was a negative space leaf drawing. The class went outside and was told to find about 8 leaves and then take them back inside a trace them onto our paper.

I drew a polaroid border on my paper lightly with my pencil, then I sorted my leaves into place and started to draw them on my paper. After I had my set up and all my leaves were drawn, my art piece was starting to come together. In this assignment, we were to use colored pencils only, as our utensil. I decided that I would go with a light brown color for fall and also because that was the color of my leaves. Instead of color the leaves that color, I colored the negative space that color or also known as the space around the leaves. After I had colored the negative space a light brown color, I looked at my piece and I was not totally satisfied with it so I went over the brown with a burgundy color to make it a little more colorful and positive. The process in making this negative space drawing, was pretty simple for me, it was a straightforward task and I could handle it well. The only really difficulties I had were, when I was tracing the leaves onto the paper, I was trying not to rip the leaf and it would curl up so it was hard to lay out flat on the paper without accidentally tearing it apart. Another thing I came across was when I colored the negative space the light brown color, I realized that I didn’t color hard enough on the paper. So, it had left white marks on the paper. But this was okay because part of me realized that I have to color harder over that, but then I took a better look at my piece and noticed that just the light brown color wasn’t very flattering. I decided that I would go over the light brown with my burgundy color to solve this problem. However, besides the little things that I fixed, I am pretty happy with how my leaf drawing came out and I thought it was a very creative idea.

For my other negative space drawing assignment, there were stools displayed in the classroom. First I drew a small light border around the edge of my paper. However, I was to look through a square frame to determine where to draw the stools on my paper. Once I had drawn the stools on the paper, again I had to color in the negative space. But this time I had to come up with my own idea of what patterns or designs I wanted to draw in my negative space. I wanted kind of like a crazy abstract vibe so I did a whole bunch of different patterns in each negative space slot. One part of the negative space was very open and would’ve been a lot for me to draw a pattern in so, I drew the sky, grass, sun, etc. Then I thought instead of drawing the outside of my border the same as the inside, I drew the outside of my border in black and white. I didn’t have too many problems with creating this piece, the only thing really was that it was more time consuming and if I had longer time I think my coloring artwork could’ve been stronger.