Dealing With Negative Space On Your Drawings And Artworks

Negative space on your drawings and illustrations is something that really becomes important especially when you are thinking about any particular drawing you are working on in the moment. You'll be able to spot areas in your art that don't really look right and you can't sometimes work out how to address it so that your illustrations don't look odd.

Here I will show you a couple of drawings were I drew the central image of a Zombie and a Demon, two totally different ink drawings and when I completed the basic ink work on these drawings I knew that I wasn't going to draw a scene or something in the background, But I didn't know what to do to fill the empty white space surrounding the drawings, so I mulled over what to do over a week later. The artwork looked ok as it was, but I knew I wanted something to cancel out that white space surrounding the undead creatures.

    

I was just adding black paint to another illustration and I had some left over black acrylic on my palette and so I decided to use a dry brush technique of loosely using rough paint strokes that would frame the illustrations and it really was a simple way of filling in the white space or the negative space, but it added some depth to the drawing and something that was unintended, but worked.

You can see in the photos below by painting some contrasting black paint in a dry brush technique with paint strokes aiming towards the middle of the art, it not only draws more focus to the centre which is the main area of interest of your illustration, it can also form the basis of further ink work such as ink splatters later on that will help your artwork even further.

If you can figure out how to work with your minds eye and your Artists eye you can balance the use of negative space quite well in a drawing and create a drawing you are happy with. This also works with ink splatter and other and even by adding other blocks of colour to the papers surface, just see what works for you.