Art Lesson #13: Draw Negative Space

Another fun game for your brain

Negative Space: Drawing what isn’t there

Over these last few months I’ve been doling out some traditional art school drawing exercises. They aren’t meant to produce great drawings. In fact, it’s just the opposite. They should produce terrible drawings!

As an exercise, they’re meant to change the way your hands, eyes, and brain are connected. They should feel more like a game or a puzzle than a process meant to lead to a masterpiece.

But they do help to build skills that you’ll use to make great drawings! In particular, this one can help change the way you see shapes. By drawing the negative space—the gaps in between the objects in your drawing—your brain stops forcing its ideas about (in this case) chairs on you. With your brain in the back seat, feeling confused and unhelpful, you’ll be free to really look at the actual shapes in front of you.

Give this one a try. Like all forms of exercise, it’s something you can come back to again and again—it’s not a one-and-done kind of thing. But remember: don’t keep drawing the same chair over and over! That would be like playing the same Wordle game over again. Your brain will build up some knowledge about how that chair is shaped, and you’ll lose the power of the exercise.

You can draw the negative shapes around literally anything: a bunch of wine glasses on a table, the gaps in a tree where the sky shows through, the area around a human figure. If you want to keep going with chairs, just do a Google image search for “wooden chair.” You’ll see lots of examples.

I have one more drawing exercise like this for you next week, and I’ll include a round-up of all the ones I’ve sent out so far, in case you want to go over them all again.

Here’s the video. Much more to come in 2024! Meanwhile, have a wonderful holiday.