The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - Betty Edwards [59]
What are negative spaces and positive forms?
Two terms traditionally used in art are “negative spaces” and “positive forms.” In the drawings of the bighorn sheep, for example, the sheep is the positive form and the sky behind and ground below the animal are the negative spaces.
The word “negative” in negative spaces is a bit unfortunate because it carries, well, a negative connotation. I have searched in vain for a better term, so we’ll stick with this one. The terms negative spaces and positive forms have the advantage of being easy to remember and they are, after all, commonly used in the whole field of art and design. The main point is that negative spaces are just as important as the positive forms. For the person just learning to draw, they are perhaps more important!
Fig. 7-1. Jeanne O’Neil.
“Expression to my way of thinking does not consist of the passion mirrored upon a human face or betrayed by a violent gesture. The whole arrangement of my picture is expressive. The place occupied by the figures or objects, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything plays a part.”
—Henri Matisse
“Notes d’un peintre,”
1908
Why is learning to see and draw negative spaces so important?
When a person just beginning in drawing tries to draw a chair, that person knows too much, in an L-mode sense, about chairs. For example, seats have to be big enough to hold a person; all four chair legs are usually all the same length; chair legs sit on a flat surface, and so forth. This knowledge does not help, and in fact can greatly hinder, drawing a chair. The reason is that, when seen from different angles, the visual information may not conform to what we know.
Visually—that is, as seen on the plane—a chair seat may appear as a narrow strip, not nearly wide enough to sit on. The legs may appear to be all of different lengths. The curve of the back of a chair may appear to be entirely different from what we know it to be (Figure 7-1).
What are we to do? An answer: Don’t draw the chair at all! Instead, draw the spaces of the chair.
Why does using negative space make drawing easier? I believe that it’s because you don’t know anything, in a verbal sense, about these spaces. Because you have no pre-existing memorized symbols for space-shapes, you can see them clearly and draw them correctly. Also, by focusing on negative spaces, you can cause L-mode again to drop out of the task, perhaps after a bit of protest: “Why are you looking at nothing? I do not deal with nothing! I can’t name it. It’s of no use . . . ” Soon, this chatter will cease—again, just what we want.
An analogy to clarify the concept of negative spaces
In drawing, negative space-shapes are real. They are not just empty “air.”
The following analogy may help you to see that. Imagine that you are watching a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Imagine that Bugs Bunny is running at top speed down a long hallway, at the end of which is a closed door. He smashes through the door, leaving a Bugs-Bunny shaped hole in the door. What’s left of the door is negative space. Note that the door has an outside edge (its format). This edge is the outside edge of the negative space-shape. In this analogy, the hole in the door is the positive form (Bugs Bunny) gone poof!
Now, take your Viewfinder/plastic Picture Plane and look at a chair. Close one eye and move the Viewfinder backward and forward, up and down, as though framing a snapshot. When you have found a composition that pleases you, hold the Viewfinder very still. Now, gazing at a space in the chair, perhaps the space between two back slats, imagine that the chair is magically pulverized and—like Bugs Bunny, in a poof!—disappears, leaving only the negative spaces, the one you are gazing at and all the rest of the spaces. They are real. They have real shapes, just like the remains of the door in the analogy above. These negative space-shapes are what you are going to draw. In short, you will draw the spaces, not the chair.
The reason? Recall our definition of edges: All edges