Negative Space

Giovanni 3 October, 2018

This drawing was made by focusing on the negative space and filling it in with a pattern or scene. I left the positive space blank. Negative space is the space that is not occupied by the object. Such as the pattern in the background of my picture. Positive space is the space that the object is occupying. This picture was made by gathering leaves and taping them to a different piece of paper. I picked a leaf,studied it and then blew up the image in my mind and drew the shape of the leaf on the bigger piece of paper. I focused on the negative space so that I would not be looking at the positive space which might make think in other terms of drawing the leaf.

To make my artwork I started off with pencil and after I finished with the design I filled in my negative space with colored pencil. I made sure to burnish with my colored pencil, which means that I pressed hard enough that there was no white showing under the color. This makes the negative space have a nice contrast against the positive space. After I finished burnishing and filling in all of the negative space in my drawing I outlined my entire border with pen. At first my leaf was a leaf without holes before I accidentally dropped a colored pencil in the positive space. I couldn't erase the colored pencil mark off my paper so I made the mark into a hole in the leaf. After viewing my drawing and armed with some advice, I decided to make another hole to make more negative space.

I am proud of my drawing and want to do more types of artwork that revolve around positive and negative space. The one thing that I wish I could fix if I had more time would be to outline the leaf with pen as well. I would probably not need to darken the pencil line between the different colors in the pattern because I burnished hard enough, but would feel better about it anyway. This was one of my favorite works of art so far and was by far one of the funnest.