Take a Seat, Not That One(That's The Still Life).

    I just wanna take a few words to mention September 11th 2001, and thank any of you who are emergency responders/military reading this for risking your lives for hundreds, maybe thousands of people. There may be a time in your life that you will be called to respond to a devastating terrorist attack or mass shooting.  We respect/thank you and those who fought the flames, and fought through the smoke for those who could not help themselves in New York City during the terrorist attack on 9/11/2001. 

   On this cool summers autumn day, we were in drawing class , as we are every Thursday. We have finally moved from boxes to chairs! Hallelujah! Today's exercise was to draw the negative shapes first, then fill in the positive planes. If you don't know what negative space is: if you put your hand up and touch your pointer finger with your thumb, and make a " Okay" hand signal , the empty space in the middle  of your thumb and pointer finger  is called negative space.

[Allison's negative space focused drawing]

   
     As "skilled" artists as we are, drawing negative space first throws the drawing a little off, due to the fact you can underestimate the scale that you are drawing at. My first drawing was too narrow in some places and fell off the page on one side. My second drawing fell off the page on the top and on the bottom. I pay attention to negative space already, but I don't draw negatives first naturally. I was taught, that if you cant figure out the shape of something on the first few tries, focus on drawing the negative space, it will give you a better view of what the edges are suppose to look like. It worked like magic. I concentrated on the pupil of an eye less often to figure out where its looking, I focus on what shapes the whites(or negative space) of the eye look like.

Sorry for boring you, here are some of our class drawings.

-Allison

    I was having trouble when we first started with our drawing class, I felt like I could draw much more complex things, but for the life of me I couldn't draw the box before me. when I took the time to sit and see what was before me though I became much more satisfied with what I was producing by the second class. Now into the third class and our instructor decides to mix it up, and asks us to draw in a way I don't typically start with.
 

[Cody's negative space focused drawing]

    As Allison before me I had been told to watch the shape of my negative spaces while drawing before, but never to draw them exclusively. I actually feel like I ended up with more accurate drawings working in this manner, and may continue to start with all negative drawings for other assignments.

-Cody

    A couple bits of info here at the end, Allison now set up the blog so that ANYONE can comment on our posts. With our without an account! So I encourage anyone reading here to leave a comment about anything, or just say hello.

    Also if anyone is interested in getting an email whenever we update the blog so you can see what we're posting, we can add you to the "mailing list". So if you would like to get email updates you can leave us your email either in the form of a comment here or on any post, or if you'd rather keep your address private you can email me at caveryart001@gmail.com.

"Art is not what you see, but what you make others see. " -Edgar Degas