Right Side Drawings
Monday, 20th December 2004
Wild West Yorkshire nature diary
Right Side Drawings
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Negative Shapes
She asks you to draw the starfish (right) on white paper, then cut out the negative shapes and reassemble them (here on black paper). You've discarded the starfish you've drawn, but, there it is: you've reconstructed it simply from the negative shapes around it.
Having learnt to see these negative shapes, even a tricky mechanical subject, like this corkscrew, shouldn't prove too difficult.
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These drawings were made using a viewfinder: a piece of paper with a rectangle an inch or two across cut in it in the same proportions as the paper I was drawing on. The viewfinder frame makes the negative spaces bounding the objects easier to see; for instance in the drawing of the office chair (left) the top left corner can be seen as having definite boundaries, like the corner piece of a jigsaw puzzle.
I ran into a bit of difficulty with the poinsettia (right);
I drew each side of the plant as carefully as I could but when I came
to the middle I realised that the plant had come out too wide. I put this
down partly to my shaky hand holding the viewfinder and partly to working
with both eyes open and so getting two slightly differing views of the
subject. 
Richard Bell, richard@willowisland.co.uk
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To
emphasise the importance of observing negative shapes Betty Edwards suggests
these exercises.
The
athletes are drawn from an internet sport photograph.
I've shaded in some of the shapes I drew - including a batlike shape and
a penguin-like shape. I tried hard not to draw the shapes of the figures
themselves. They've ended up a looking rather odd, for instance, I'm not
sure what happened to the central figure's head, but concentrating on
the negative shapes has given the group, dare I say it, in the context
of such a wobbly sketch, a Matisse-like rhythm.