This is a picture I painted last year during the 30x30 Direct Watercolor challenge. For that challenge, you weren't allowed to draw in pencil or in pen, you were only allowed to go directly to paper with paint. I picked a photograph of my friend Susan's dog, Mouse, who is primarily a white dog, and I painted the entire background around Mouse to pull her image out of the paper, only afterwards going in to add the details of face, freckles, etc. Here is my painting:
In other words, everything rust-colored on the page was painted first, around the bulk that was Mouse.
In today's challenge, however, we were to draw the negative space when that space was white. So if you were going to draw a portrait in the conventional way, you would look at your model and draw the outline of the hair, face, body, etc., looking specifically at those things for your cues. But when drawing the negative space, you look instead at the background, and draw a line that encompasses that background, which in turn isolates your individual (or in this case individuals).
I drew this one in pencil, and stopped to scan it, simply so I could show the difference (it's subtle but it's there) in drawing the background instead of drawing the foreground. It's like a contour drawing in reverse.
Once past the drawing stage, I painted this as I would anything else, but it definitely gave me a sense of what was foreground and what was background. I also cry foul on Sktchy for today, because this was definitely TWO portraits in one, and took at least twice the time to finish! And I'm still a day behind...
Day 10—30Faces30Days
"Kate and Kat" on Sktchy
Pencil, watercolors, in Bee mixed media sketchbook
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