Negative Space and Counterchange

'Who Goes There?' Acrylic Watercolour

I have touched on counterchange, dark against light and light against dark, in one of my previous articles but what is this negative space thing?

Quite simple really – it is the space around an object or the space which an object surrounds.
Try this little experiment, it can be fun. Start with a plain white sheet of paper and paint just what you can see through the handle of a mug. Then paint everything you can see around the mug itself so that you are left with a white space on the paper which is the shape of the mug. You have defined this shape not by painting the shape itself but by painting everything around that shape. Now you can put some detail in the shape itself and there you have it.

An object or a set of objects can be defined simply by drawing or painting the negative spaces, which enclose or are contained within the object's boundaries.

All this sounds very complicated but the painting shown above was chosen for today’s illustration because the gate was primarily developed in the painting by drawing the spaces between the railings. This together with counterchange defined the gate precisely before any of the details of the gate itself were painted.

The Stoat obviously wasn’t there when the gate was painted but it was a frequent visitor to the garden and it seemed appropriate to include it.

An understanding of negative space and counterchange is very useful as these powerful concepts can lead to the creation of exciting and powerful pictures. It is well worth the effort to think about and experiment with these techniques.

That's it for today. Until next time take care and keep practising.

Tony