NOW AVAILABLE IN ITALIAN! with grateful thanks to Alessandro Pedroni : Disegno Negativo con Mike Sibley
The tools you will require are simple:
- Paper – preferably plate finish or at least smooth
- Pencils – 6B, 2B, HB, H, and 2H (I use 2mm clutch pencils but any will do)
- Kneaded eraser or Blu-Tack (preferably the latter)
I often hear the phrases 'negative drawing' and 'negative space' used as if they are synonymous. They aren't. Negative space is employed as a brain-fooling method of seeing shapes with clarity. Negative Drawing is a conscious method of working that isolates and protects areas of your paper. These areas can be entire elements that are often completed later; smaller areas where the intention is to leave them as virgin highlights or white shapes against a darker background; or minute areas that, for example, form white hairs between their cast shadows.
To further dispel confusion, Negative Drawing does not involve any form of erasing. Applying graphite and cutting into it with an eraser could be described as 'drawing in negative', but it is the exact opposite of true Negative Drawing, which primarily exists to isolate and protect virgin areas of paper. Think of it as defining the boundaries of a shape using only the tone that surrounds it. In other words, you aren't drawing the object but simply giving the illusion of the object by drawing around it.
NEGATIVE SPACE
Negative Drawing involves the conscious creation of negative space so let's study that first. The brain would seem by all accounts to store memory in the form of images, and these images, or symbols, are the mainstay of the it’s defence mechanism. Matching to stored, standard symbols offers a very speedy classification system. However, as artists, this facility works against us, because our brains automatically overlay the images we see with a range of symbols. This effectively disables the ability to produce realistic drawing because the information gathered is so basic – and often inaccurate if the brain’s ‘guess’ was incorrect.
Fortunately, there are many ways of fooling the brain into letting go of the desire to match symbols, to classify, during the act of drawing. For example, working faster than you can think serves to disable the argumentative side of your brain, which struggles to keep up and then loses interest.
To learn to see what is really there and not what you think is there, you need to take your brain’s automatic reaction out of the equation. Believe me, learning to see correctly really is a hard lesson to learn but the best way involves fooling your brain into not recognising the troublesome features. Fortunately, we have Negative Space as a supreme tool.
Using negative space
This exercise will not only help your mind to concentrate on the spaces between lines it will also help to confound your brain – your logical mind that attempts to identify everything it sees. You’re going to give it a really tough time because instead of drawing an object itself, you’ll be drawing the empty space around it. Take two strips of paper; say an inch by three inches (2.5 x 7.5cm). Now shade the right-hand end of one strip right up to the edges…
Now do the same to the left-hand end of the other strip and, without drawing any lines, leave an oblong clear in the bottom corner.
Now take a clean sheet of paper and lay your two strips end to end with a gap between them.
What you have drawn is the capital letter ‘L’. That the letter exists is entirely due to negative space. The white of the letter is pristine, not a result of the removal of graphite.
Practice drawing articles you know. Try to picture each on the page and then shade around it. Don’t draw lines around them first - if you do, you’ll just be shading around a positive shape, not shading the negative space to cause the positive image to appear. Since these abstract shapes share a continuous border with the object, when you draw the negative shape, you’ll be drawing the positive outline too.