Ladies and Gentleman, negative space is my new favourite thing in the world. Even more then turtles.
My biggest influence on the way I draw was my mother, who is an artist. She taught me to look at negative space. The lesson came one day when I was frustrated that my drawings of trees never really looked like trees. They just looked like a bunch of lines. I could not get a feel of the shape or structure of a tree. She taught me to draw the shapes between the branches instead of the branches themselves. When you do that, you quickly come a lot closer to actually drawing something that resembles a tree. When I am drawing letters I use the same approach. I am drawing the white shapes, not the black strokes. So the relationship between the white shapes on the inside of the character and the outside of the character is something I am very interested in. Cyrus Highsmith, Type Designer
It’s funny how these things happen. I read the above quote, from the My Fonts Creative Charachters mailout, on Sunday afternoon in work. It’s not that negative space is new to me, just until now I haven’t really explored it. It’s always been there, but it has never been my focus.
Then today I got this tweet
I Googled the song and found this…..
and in the comments…..
11albinogiraffes I agree. Negative space rocks.
Then I remembered an interview I saw with Benga.
Jump to 1:42 for the quote
I try to create a lot of space in my music. I’m always low cutting things… hi passing things….. that’s how I create space in my music Benga, Dub Step Artist
All of a sudden I’m surrounded by negative space, I see it everywhere. I’m off to explore!
Tags: Design, Musings, negative space
