Negative Painting on Textured background

Instructions for

Negative Painting #1

Start with a background that you have used texture techniques on:

Salting, Saran wrap, straw blowing, or spattering. LEAVE WHITE,

Especially in the places you want to have as points of interest.

After it is dry, draw on your design. It should have INTERLOCKING

shapes. (This can be leaves, daisies, cone flowers, fish, or any other

repeating shape in different sizes)

The rule is to NOT HAVE ANY TWO NEGATIVE SHAPES

the same distance apart or the same size.

In the first picture you can see the interlocking leaves drawn over the textured paper. In the bottom right corner, you can see where I have begun to paint blue behind the leaves, in the negative space. I've carried that color to the other side of the leaf to avoid looking like a patchwork quilt.

Using a medium value paint, PAINT THE NEGATIVES, or the spaces

between your shapes. This should make all your positive shapes pop

out. You should be able to see whether you have a good design.You can always make them darker later.

When painting these negatives, remember to bring your color through

to other shapes so they don’t look like a patchwork quilt. You want the

illusion that all of that is behind your positive shapes.

When you are happy with the background, you can start on the positive

shapes. The positives are brought out by painting into the shape underneath them,

making that a negative space. (More on that next week)

In the second picture, you can see all the space behind the leaves has been painted in with a medium tone. You begin to see the leaf shapes.

NOTE ON COMPOSITION:

We also talked about the “Golden Mean” of composition. This is the ideal

place to put your center of interest, the natural places your eyes want to go

first. There are many ways of making something “pop” as a center of interest

You can use complementary colors; very light against very dark; harder edges

if most of your surrounding edges are soft; or  a spot of “surprise” color.