Negative Painting

29 August 2016 / Workshops

Today’s topic was Negative Painting. Most artworks are painted positive, and typically add one shape on top of another.
Negative painting is when we paint the space around an object rather than painting the object itself. It is easier to understand if we view images as shapes and contours as our brain has to do a small somersault to figure out what the object is.

In the first exercise we used the philodendron leaves as an example. One canvas was prepared with a dark background, the other canvas was left white before we started with the heart shape of the philodendron leave.
On the white canvas we outlined the shape of the plant in dark colours, leaving the shape as a white plant

We found the poisitive example we used on pinterest https://au.pinterest.com/pin/73957618858396158/
On the black canvas we outlined the plant shape in white leaving the plant shape as a dark positive shape

Negative Example
Of course we had some very mixed results as it was a first time for many of us that we experimented with negative painting.

And some of us hadn’t even realised that they just painted the positive shape instead of the negative shape until I pointed it out to them.

and some of us were very adventures and selected their own design

The second group tried to tackle a much more difficult painting of a group of trees and also ended up with very different results.

There will be no Class next Monday 5th September but for 12th September we will work on more diverse negative space. We will use Linda Kemp’s book ‘Simplifying Design and Colour’ as inspiration and will start by preparing some coloured background for the next art piece

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