4 Ways to Help Art Students Understand Negative Space

First of all, it’s important to have a general idea what negative space is. It’s essentially the space surrounding an object, figure, or form. This can be the space in an actual place but typically refers to the space in an artwork. The positive space refers to the object, figure, or form that exists within the negative space and is typically what young artists want to concentrate on. Understanding the importance of representing both positive and negative space in an artwork and learning to “see” negative space helps artists to create fuller artistic pieces with greater balance and depth. One way to understand the value of negative space is to compare it to the pauses or silences between the notes of a song which, as has been often said, give the song much of its unique form and personality.

1. Contour Drawing of Negative Space
A basic introductory exercise is to have students lay their hand with fingers splayed on a piece of paper and instruct them to trace it and then color or shade in the entire paper around their hand. When they lift their hand, they can see that by filling in the space around their hand, they have created an image of their hand’s shape. By learning to see and draw the negative or surrounding space, an artist is able to make the outer outline or contour of the positive space (object) naturally appear. Another way to describe this is the figure-ground relationship.

Drawing the holes or gaps in an image of a chair is a popular and powerful way to engage students in negative space drawing. Position a chair (preferably with slats or bars) in the middle of the classroom. Run your hands through the space surrounding the chair and going through the chair’s legs and slats. Explain that this will be the negative space in the drawing; that today you will be drawing this space around the chair instead of the chair itself. A teacher demo will be helpful is this is tricky to explain verbally.

Another way to make this activity accessible to students is to sit a table-top object right in front of them and encourage them to use their fingers or pencil to touch and trace the outer contour of the object before drawing the outline of the negative space on their paper. This outer contour or outline is the barrier between the positive and negative space. Art Instruction Blog describes this type of drawing in this way: “[y]ou aren’t drawing the object but simply giving the illusion of the object by drawing around it.”

When the weather is nice, students can draw gaps between objects and negative spaces by sitting outside and drawing the shapes of sunlight shining between tree leaves instead of the leaves themselves.

2. Erase the Negative Space
Another way to create an image by purposefully concentrating on the negative space around an object is through erasure. First, students will cover an entire paper with a black, gray, or another dark hue with a medium that can be erased. They might use medium-dark pencil shading without too much pressure and a standard pink eraser or charcoal with a gum eraser. The students’ goal will be to remove or pull away all of the negative space they see around an object by erasing the negative space from the picture. When they do this, only the object remains in the dark hue. Again a chair is useful here or another object with clear outlines and chunks of positive and negative space. Instruct children to not draw any positive space (don’t draw the chair) but to create the chair by erasing everything around its shape on the paper. Again, a teacher demo will be helpful is this is tricky to explain verbally.

3. Explore Optical Illusions
Introducing optical illusions is a great way to further students’ understanding of positive and negative space in a fun way. Optical illusions often make it confusing for our brains to determine which part of an image is the positive or dominant are and which is receding or negative. A famous or useful example of this is found in “Rubin’s Vase,” below.

Psychologist Edgar Rubin created a series of these ambiguous or reversing images in 1915.

I have found that optical illusions are very popular with students and that the artist M.C. Escher is a wonderful exemplar when teaching students about tricks of the eye and positive and negative space. Students in 5^th to 6^th grade and up (or sometimes younger, if proper scaffolding is provided) can create their own optical illusion tessellations or interlocking repeating patterns. These are often a great way for children to learn about patterns for math class as well. Tessellations require multiple steps–a few too many to list here–but Exploratorium offers a great PDF tutorial on tessellations for 6^th grade here.

The Awesome Arts offers a great paper cutting video tutorial that allows students to make their own positive and negative mirrored artwork with black and white paper. This lesson mimics the Notan Japanese style of black and white/positive and negative paper cutting.

4. Stencil and Printing Art
You can also use stenciling and printing to help students understand positive and negative space in a new medium. With a stencil project, a stencil, or sheet with images cut out, is laid over a surface. When color is applied, the color only hits the surface below and appears where the stencil layer is absent. When cutting out and creating a stencil, students have to remember that the final image will mimic the stencil’s negative space, or the pieces of paper they remove. Screen printing projects are a great way to explore this process.

You can also use objects and a spray bottle of color to create negative space outlines on paper or canvas. The Art of Ed shares an example with objects students have collected in nature. In this example, students can arrange leaves and twigs on their surface and then spray the surface with color. The color will only be able to saturate the surface around the objects (their negative space). In the resulting image, like in the hand tracing exercise described earlier, the objects will be represented with bare surface and will be outlined and made visible by colorful negative space.

While negative and positive space can be tricky concepts to discuss verbally at times, using lots of visual examples and exercises like these helps students to experience and more fully understand these concepts. When they do, they will have added another drawing approach, method of observation, and useful skill to their box of art tools which they can continue to refine and rely on in their future creative works.

Written by Julia Travers

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