Using Negative Space in Framed Glass Painting

Video Transcript

"DAVID A. CLEMEN: Hi, I'm David Clemen on behalf of Expert Village, and today we're going to paint a piece of glass inside of a frame. Okay, while the second layer is drying, I just wanted to talk about negative space a little bit. And if you've ever taken an art class, I'm sure you've heard of it, but we'll just kind of point some stuff out here. When you're painting on glass, if I fill all these in with paint, I don't really have any negative space for light to go through and cast a shadow and so forth. So I have all this negative space in between these borders and then up to the middle of the trunk here, and that's going to let light show through even though I might add one more color into my background. And then when I pull the tape off, that's going to be negative space as well, so have a good mix of positive space which is the actual tree and the borders. And then once I take the tape off and then leave most--the rest of this glass just as it is, then I'm going to have a good mix of positive and negative space. And notice that I've filled the glass; I didn't just come over here and paint. So in the next step, I'm going to add one more layer of paint; probably, I'll add the trunk in here and maybe fill in some colors in the other areas. But I want to leave some negative space so my light can get through on this glass painting."