How to Draw From Negative Space

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Jay French at jayfrenchstudios.com. Today I'm going to teach you about drawing from a negative space. Now essentially the idea behind this is of course to basically draw everything except what your subject is. We'll show you by, let's pick a leaf. It's a nice basic shape, you can actually can draw the outline, you can draw it very lightly. If you're feeling brave and you know the shape well enough, you can actually just start drawing and make the shape as you go, if you don't want that line in there. Of course using a pencil, and you can erase it. What we're going to do here is actually use a little color. We're not going to use green because that's predictable. We're going to use this reddish-gold here and basically you want a dark edge around your object that's going to be your negative and you'll fade out from there. And again another way I've mentioned that you could, if you're brave and you know the shape well enough, you could just start here or you could erase a pencil or in this case, this is a darken color, it's going to cover up anyway so it doesn't really matter. But you can also do this on tracing paper. You can have your image underneath of what you want to draw on negative and just start out with, if you're just going to do it in graphite pencil, or in charcoal or in some form of color like color pencils or contour crayons or pastels. As you fade out as you go, you get a really strong negative image and basically what you have here is a drawing of narra leaf, which you get the impression of leaf because of where it's missing from the rest of the picture. And of course this can work in the actual realism as well, such as drawing a person walking in the fog and the areas where they fade out is actually, you could say that's a drawing, "oh well that's a drawing I could see the fog". Well you can't really, you can just see the fog affecting him negatively, affecting the subject. And so you're seeing something that isn't there, by the fact that it's not there. And that's your basic lesson on how to draw a negative space."