Designing Positive & Negative Space

Video Transcript

There's a kind of a fun project that helps you really get the hang of positive/negative space and creating the tension between the background and the foreground, and I've called it an "exploding square". You cut a square of black paper, it can be any size. I try to make it kind of proportional to the paper, to my background, which is the white paper. And I've cut it up in a few basic shapes, nothing very complicated, you don't want to get teeny, tiny shapes with this. What I'm going to do is start moving the shapes apart. I want to be able to visually see how this goes back together so that you could sort of visually put it back together if you had to, like doing your jigsaw puzzle just by eying it. So you start playing around with these, and that means that the space between the shapes gets very important, and you start creating a tension. Now, you can play it this way, can I make my way through and can I see how that all kind of could coalesce back in the middle, sort of zoom itself back in? When is there too much space? If I put this over here, and maybe these are very much closer together over here, do you still get the idea that you could pull this back around, and do you like it like this? Because now, you're playing with these shapes. Now, look, you've got this shape here, but look at the shape it's making over here. Is that a shape that you like? And then it's opening out because of this curve and this curve, into this. Well that kind of zooms you off the page, so maybe we shuffle these over here. And you keep trying to play around with these until you find some composition that keeps it together but keeps it apart, which sort of sounds like an oxymoron in a way. So I'm going to keep moving these around. I've left the edges open and you don't have to if you don't want to, you don't have to be scared of edges either. So you can just play around with this until you like what you see. Now I've got a design I like, perhaps, but I don't have a square, so you have to move them back in and start again.

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