![]() ![]() You can also use stenciling and printing to help students understand positive and negative space in a new medium. This lesson mimics the Notan Japanese style of black and white/positive and negative paper cutting. 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. 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. These are often a great way for children to learn about patterns for math class as well. 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. Escher is a wonderful exemplar when teaching students about tricks of the eye and positive and negative space. I have found that optical illusions are very popular with students and that the artist M.C. Psychologist Edgar Rubin created a series of these ambiguous or reversing images in 1915. A famous or useful example of this is found in “Rubin’s Vase,” below. 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. Introducing optical illusions is a great way to further students’ understanding of positive and negative space in a fun way. Again, a teacher demo will be helpful is this is tricky to explain verbally. 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 chair is useful here or another object with clear outlines and chunks of positive and negative space. When they do this, only the object remains in the dark hue. 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. They might use medium-dark pencil shading without too much pressure and a standard pink eraser or charcoal with a gum eraser. First, students will cover an entire paper with a black, gray, or another dark hue with a medium that can be erased. 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.Īnother way to create an image by purposefully concentrating on the negative space around an object is through erasure. Art Instruction Blog describes this type of drawing in this way: “ou aren’t drawing the object but simply giving the illusion of the object by drawing around it.” This outer contour or outline is the barrier between the positive and negative space. A teacher demo will be helpful is this is tricky to explain verbally.Īnother 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. 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. Run your hands through the space surrounding the chair and going through the chair’s legs and slats. ![]() Position a chair (preferably with slats or bars) in the middle of the classroom. Another way to describe this is the figure-ground relationship.ĭrawing the holes or gaps in an image of a chair is a popular and powerful way to engage students in negative space drawing. 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. 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. 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.Ī 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. ![]() 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. 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. This can be the space in an actual place but typically refers to the space in an artwork. It’s essentially the space surrounding an object, figure, or form. First of all, it’s important to have a general idea what negative space is. ![]()
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