Drawing Notes - Negative and Positive Spaces

Your ability to draw is greatly enhanced when you know how to identify positive and negative spaces, visually measure distances, and apply the resulting information to your drawings.

This lesson illustrates and demonstrates the process of breaking down subjects into positive and negative spaces, and sketching their shapes within a drawing space. The four parts are:

• Seeing lines between spaces
• Containing spaces in a drawing space
• From seeing spaces to sketching shapes
• Examining the final stages of a drawing.

Contour lines are formed when edges of spaces and/or objects meet. Contour lines can outline a complete object as well as its individual parts.

A contour drawing comprised of lines that follow the contours of the edges of various components of a subject and define the outline of its shapes.

Shapes are the outward contours or outlines of objects. Basic shapes include circles, ovals, squares or rectangles.

Positive space is the space in a drawing that is occupied by an object and/or its various parts.

Negative space refers to the background around and/or behind an object or another space.

Proportion refers to the relationship in size of one component of a drawing to another or others.

A drawing space (also called the drawing surface or a drawing format), refers to the area in which you render a drawing within a specific perimeter.

You can use the overall shape of your subject (and its parts) as a contour drawing in two steps:

1. Study the subject until you can identify the subject’s positive space. Everything else is then considered negative space.
2. Examine the shapes and sizes of the positive and negative spaces and how they fit together to identify the locations of the contour lines.