Positive & Negative Space in Design

Video Transcript

One item that is difficult to really understand, and that it really helps if you do do these exercises of moving shapes around the page, is getting the idea of positive and negative space. Basically we're usually working on a white piece of paper and we have darker shapes on it so that we can see the shapes. So here we have our shape in the middle of the page. And this is positive, and then the page around it, the rest of the field is the negative. What we want to do, in a successful drawing or painting or design, is to make the background not just be background but be alive, really make a difference, so that we start to see a tension. You want to produce a tension between the background and the foreground, between the field and the objects that you're putting on it. So I'm going to start trying to create a way of making the positive and negative really mix together, and what happens here is that when I do this, you can't ignore this space in here, you're shaping the white background with the edge of the black. So it's where the edges come together that you start to build this tension. I might add more over here, and now all of a sudden I have, here, I've sort of built myself a rectangle of white, and a rectangle of black, and then we start to see another rectangle of black up here. Let's see, we'll just use a bigger one for now. We use a big shape like this, you can see now that what's more important, this rectangle or this rectangle? And you're starting to go back and forth between the positive and negative space, and that's what you want to try to have happen in your pictures.

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