Negative Painting
This week, in one of my watercolor classes, I gave my students a project focused on “negative painting.” That is when an artist paints around the positive form in order to push that positive form forward. My goal was to help the students enhance their understanding of how both positive and negative shapes can be designed in paintings.
In classic watercolor, painting negatively is a critical part of the painting process because we paint around lighter colors. Because the paints are transparent and white and light shapes are unpainted paper rather than opaque paint applied on top, artists are forced to paint negatively much of the time. In this project, I hoped that the students would become more mindful of the necessity of designing all the shapes in their paintings, not just the positive forms.
In this week’s ArtSpeaks Studio Moment video I demonstrate how to paint negatively. I hope viewers will find it helpful. To see the video, go the ArtSpeaks Studio website blog or the ArtSpeaks by Kay Byfield YouTube channel. Let me know what you think.
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