The past few exercises helped you to use line to
express your drawings. Now, we'll use what might be
thought of as the opposite of line - space. A single
line on the paper segments the drawing plane into "that
area" and "this area", in addition, a single line also
represents the outside of an object that you are
attempting to depict. Line may be the single most
important element in drawing because it's what defines
it as a drawing, But the SECOND most important element
would be space and the shapes created by the combination
of space and line.
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A contour drawing. |
Space is the white area on your paper that isn't
marked by the pencil. It's the old "yin and yang" idea;
good and evil, left and right, positive and negative,
and in drawing: Line and Space. The part of your drawing
surface that you DON'T mark tells just as much of the
story as the part that you DO mark. A true contour
drawing (a single line that follows the outside edge of
a simple object) illustrates the point of negative and
positive space best because, with no detail at all
inside the object, you are still able to determine what
the object represents. So, in the next few
exercises we will be concentrating on what artists call
the white spaces on a drawing - negative space. The
next few exercises will help your creative mind to further
confound your logical mind. Your logical mind will not
be able to identify what it is you're drawing because
you're not going to be drawing the object itself but the
empty shapes around the object.
What we'll be creating is sort of a
"white shadow" of an object. A shadow only shows the
contours of the object it's a shadow of, there's no
interior detail in the shadow. That's what we'll be
doing: only depicting the contours, no interior detail.
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Can you see the Name or just the lighter
wood shapes? |
Here's a real world
example of space and shape: Have you ever seen those
wooden plaques that say "Jesus" on them? Actually, it
DOESN'T say "Jesus", it's just a bunch of wooden shapes
glued to a plaque. The spaces between the wooden shapes
are what form the name "Jesus". The spaces that form the
name are the "negative" spaces in the plaque, the wooden
shapes are the "positive" forms. What makes this plaque
fun to look at is that the negatives and positives are
reversed, what you'd normally expect to be positive is
negative and vice versa. In the next exercise you will
be drawing the "wooden shapes" of an object or the
"negative spaces". |
