Hi, I'm Danny Gregory and I'm gonna teach you how to draw.
Do you ever find that when you're drawing, sometimes you
just get overwhelmed by all the stuff that there is in the
thing that you want to draw?
It's a real struggle to figure out how do you
draw the proportion?
How do you feel with perspective?
How do you figure out all these details?
Where do they all go?
Where do I start drawing?
It's just too much.
Well, today I'm gonna teach you a concept that's gonna really
help you with your drawing.
It's a little bit tricky because what we're gonna
talk about is drawing stuff that isn't really there.
It's pretty cool.
Check out this video.
Have you ever seen anything like this before?
The kind of Grecian urn in the middle is
turning, and as it does.
Suddenly you see two faces, right?
It even looks like they're looking at each other and
talking to each other.
It's a fun illusion.
This is kind of connected to what we're gonna be
talking to do about today, which is a concept that
is called negative space.
So in the case of this, this urn, those faces are
actually the negative space.
They are the background that is defining the object.
As we've discussed before.
When you look at something.
To draw it.
A lot of time your left, left brain takes over and says,
um, what do I call this?
I have to put a name on it.
That's a nose.
Oh, that's a wheel.
Oh, that's a chair.
Instead, what we want to do is we wanna focus on shapes
because drawing is really about drawing shapes in this.
You draw the shapes, they become the thing.
What if, instead of looking at this plant and thinking of
it as a plant, what if we said we are gonna draw the wall?
Behind the plant, the wall that we can see through
the leaves, we're gonna draw that shape instead.
What does that shape tell us about the plant and what
does it tell us about the leaves of the plant and the
distance from each other?
Maybe we don't even think about the fact
that it's a plant at all.
We're just thinking that here's an abstract shape.
I'm gonna copy down each line, and eventually I'm gonna end up
with, oh, it looks like a plant.
Well, look at this scene.
Our brain says, oh, I know that's a, it's a guy on a
dock sitting on a dock, and.
Um, okay.
That's my left brain speaking and it says, um, okay, I
want to draw a guy and I want to draw a doc, but I
don't really know how to draw the perspective of the doc.
I don't really know how to draw people particularly well.
I can't really draw dogs.
I.
So what if we instead said, let's not deal with those things
we quote unquote don't know how to do, and let's instead
draw the sky or the water and the shape of that instead.
Or what if, instead of drawing these dishes,
what if we drew the table?
We can see around the dishes and we just focus on that shape
or look at these buildings, oh my, it's so complicated, right?
So many angles and perspective and windows and columns.
It's just so much.
And our left brain is freaking out because it
doesn't know how to do it.
But what if we said instead, let's look at
the shape of the sky.
It's kind of a complicated sheep, but
it's not controllable.
I slow down.
I really try to draw that sheep, and then lo and behold.
It becomes a guide, and that guide helps me to define each
building, helps me to get a sense of where the windows are.
It also will start to come together.
It's a very complicated drawing.
I totally acknowledge that.
But at least you'll know where to begin, or at least
you'll have an infrastructure or a framework to start to
build your drawing from.
And we can use negative space to do a whole drawing.
You could draw only the negative space, only draw the sky.
It might be a little bit abstract, but that's not
really how we usually use negative space.
The main way use it is as a way of getting out of
complicated situations.
We run into a problem, we say, I don't know how to
exactly draw that cup handle.
I.
What if instead I draw the space inside the cup handle
negative space helps to simplify things so we can
figure out how to ask ourselves the important questions that
we need to answer as we're drawing, what's the angle?
Where do these parts overlap?
What is the proportion?
How do I draw this shape without again, thinking
I know how to draw it.
'cause that's what we want to avoid.
We want to avoid those shortcuts and how to draw
a wheel and how to draw a car and how to draw a nose.
No, you don't.
If you know how to draw this car, this wheel, this
nose, you need to observe, and the negative space is
gonna be a framework that helps you to define it.
Okay, let's have a look at this chair.
Right off we'd say, oh boy.
There's all these different parts to it, right?
The one leg is closer to me.
The other legs are, are in perspective, but
they're also angled.
There's all those different rungs at the back, but they're
not quite evenly spaced from where I'm sitting.
It's a simple chair, but it's not, doesn't
seem simple to draw.
What do we do?
Let's simplify the actual shape of the chair.
Get rid of all the shiny bits, get rid of all the perspective,
and just make it one color.
Okay?
Harder to do in reality.
But we've done it here through the magic of, uh, YouTube When
we simplify the chair like this, okay, it becomes a shape.
It's still a very complex shape, and I still feel a
little overwhelmed by that.
Now, let's try drawing the wall behind the chair.
It's pretty simple.
It's just a shape.
It's a, a kind of complex shape, but it's
basically a shape anyway.
Well, maybe I could draw the shape between the legs and I
could draw the shape between the seat and the legs, and I could
draw the shapes between the rungs at the back of the chair.
So if I can draw each of those things and put them
together, then something I've drawn most of the chair.
If I can draw most of the chair, I can draw all of the chair.
So now I'm just gonna try freehand drawing it
with a pen and paper.
This is just a plain old Bick pen and some copier paper.
And uh, I'm gonna start by just drawing this
shape here along the side.
That's basically the shape of this part of the wall.
And uh, I am.
Drawing this line, and then I'm gonna come down here.
Now I'm not, I'm rushing this a little bit.
Perhaps you wanna draw it more slowly, but, um, I'm just
trying to get the gist of it.
And then I'm drawing down here, drawing here and there.
I've drawn basically that shape of the wall back there.
And now let's draw, um, these shapes in between here.
There's a shape there.
It goes up and it's a little bit wide.
Comes down and it ends there, and then I could
draw this shape here.
I screwed it up there, but who cares?
Now I'm gonna draw the shape in here, which goes down
here, and it kind of lines up with this third one.
You see it stops here and it comes down.
Then it goes back up, and then there's another
little shape here.
Shape here.
That's sort of a parallelogram, I guess you'd call it.
And then there's a little tiny triangle in here.
'cause this way it comes back, forms that triangle.
And then there's, um, shape here that comes down.
And then I'm looking at these, um, lines on the floor, right?
I could, if I wanted to, I could use these lines as a guide too.
So now I'm gonna come back down here.
I'm saying, okay, there's that line for the guide and uh,
there's this connection here.
Um, and then if I was again, just drawing this floor, I would
say, okay, there's a line here.
There's a line there.
So that means that this angle, see, I'm looking at
this angle here on the floor.
And then I'm just gonna connect these two things.
So I have that leg, and then, um, I look in here
and I say, oh, I didn't actually draw this correctly.
This part, this shape is actually like that.
Why?
Because there's this little part of the thing that
you can see behind it.
But now I look at this line and I go, well, this
should line up with this, so let me correct that
and.
Now I'm gonna draw this piece in between here, which is sort
of like a tall rectangle that is narrow at the bottom, so
it's not quite a rectangle.
And I look at this line, I look at this line that goes across,
and I say, okay, so this.
Part of this negative shape is there.
So you see what I'm doing is I'm using the negative
shape, but I'm drawing the positive as well.
So I'm not being completely orthodox about this
because I'm an artist, not a computer program.
Um, and then I come back here and I go back up.
Look at this angle, it comes down here 'cause it's
continuous with that line.
And then.
This line.
So now how long should this leg be?
Well, I can just look at the line on the floor.
The line on the floor shows me that it goes
all the way across here.
So that take line is like that, and then this continues down.
How far does it go?
It goes down a bit here and there.
So now I've drawn basically the outline of this chair,
and if I want to, I could go in and I could draw
these parts and I could.
You know, complete them and I could make it go from
being a negative, which it is now, and just use
it to draw the positive.
So I might find that my connections need to be adjusted
a tiny bit, but basically there are all the parts and I know
that they are a lot, it was a lot easier to do this than if
I'd just drawn chair itself.
And then up here, I made this a little fatter than it should
be, so I can adjust it again.
Just that, adjust that, adjust that, adjust that.
And that's reasonably accurate version of this chair, I think.
So that's negative space.
It is a very useful tool, and it's one we're gonna
come to again and again as we are trying to do our contour
drawing and we are needing a little bit of help to figure
out some part of the drawing, some perspectives, some.
Angle or just even figuring out where to begin.
It's a very cool and ancient tool that has been helping
artists since time immemorial, and it's gonna help you as
well go off and practice this.
The more you practice, the more you put this into effect,
the more it will become second nature, the better
your drawings will be, the more accurate they'll be,
easier they are to make.
Um, and then when you're done, check out the next
lesson in this series.
I hope to see you there.