The positives of negative spaces.

In the past year, I have hooked a lot of faces. It all started with a portrait of 2Pac that I hooked for my son's birthday last year, and there's been a face on the go pretty much since then. I've also done some feature studies. One was a mouth - a voluptuous pair of lips created by hooking the space around them - the "negative space". It was fascinating to see the shapes emerge as I hooked.

So, I decided to try an entire face to see if it worked as well. As in all the other faces and feature studies, the secret is to concentrate on the shapes created in the negative space. It's a little like those optical illusions that fascinated me so much when I was younger. You know the ones where you see one thing first, and then you see something else. I loved those!

From "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" to just about any other art book, artists and art teachers all agree that the space around the shapes is as important as the shapes themselves. Would one exist without the other?

At any rate, this the face that I created with negative space. I enjoyed the exercise of hooking it. And I like how it turned out. Your eye definitely moves back and forth between the dark shapes and the light spaces created between.

And the biggest positive of this negative space study was, of course, the learning.