Create > Ground as Figure Drawing

Create > Ground as Figure Drawing

Access Prior Knowledge:

Instructional Strategy

• Deepen Understanding

Learning Activity

Understand > If you draw the shape of the space between my arm and body, what are you also drawing?

New Information:

Instructional Strategy

• Deepen Understanding

Learning Activity

Understand > The Figure Ground Principle

This describes the conditions of an image in which both the filled (figure, positive space) and unfilled (ground, negative space) areas are given equal importance.  An artwork becomes more compositionally unified as equal importance is given to both figure and ground shapes within the edges of the work.

During observational drawing, if the shapes of the ground spaces are drawn, the figure shapes are inadvertently drawn as well.

You must understand that the positive forms and the negative spaces share the same edges.

View > Lisa Renermann’s Type the Sky Series > http://goo.gl/vqHs0Q

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Apply Knowledge & Skills:

Instructional Strategy

• Nonlinguistic Representations

Learning Activity

Create > Ground as Figure Drawing

Goal: Inadvertently expose the figure shape by drawing the in and around ground spaces

Studio Activity:

1. Select a chair to draw.  Use a real chair, not a photograph.
2. Look at the chair with one eye closed.  Closing one eye flattens the image by limiting vision to a monocular or single image.  Binocular vision (both eyes open) produces a double image, enabling us to perceive a three-dimensional form.  It simply is a little easier to transfer a flat, one-eyed image to a flat paper.  Most artists use this technique at least occasionally.
3. Stare at the whole image as thought you were memorizing it, fixing the image in your mind.  Next, imagine the positive form of the chair on paper just as you saw it.
4. Direct your stare back at the chair.  Imagine that poof! The chair is gone, leaving the negative spaces intact and solid.  Hold your gaze there and wait until you can see the spaces as shapes.  (This might take time).  
5. Your job now is to draw only the spaces, one after another. It doesn’t really matter where you start, because all the shapes will fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.  You don’t have to think about the chair at all.  
6. Do not question why the edge of a space goes this way or that.  Just draw it as you see it. Use the edge of your paper as a gauge when judging angles and line direction.

Trigger Mechanisms: Figure/ground, right-brain, silence

Visual Examples:

Instructional Strategy

• Nonlinguistic Representations

Learning Activity

Create > Ground as Figure Painting

Goal: Create an abstract painting emphasizing the ground as figure

Studio Activity:

1. Using a viewfinder crop out an interesting section of your negative space chair drawing.
2. Enlarge the cropped section by redrawing it on a larger sheet of paper.
3. Use color as desired to create an abstract design.
4. Pay particular attention and create unity, contrast, and balance.
5. Unity may be created by repetition of angles, forms or colors.  
6. In order to achieve balance, each side of the design should have equal attractiveness.

Trigger Mechanisms: Crop, Abstract, Color textures

Visual Examples: https://goo.gl/photos/fzrJiGCjVmpK5mit5

Generalize, Reflect & Publish:

Instructional Strategy

• Providing Recognition

Learning Activity

Publish > your drawing to our G+Community > Concepts & Creations category

Respond > in the comment section write the following reflection.

• Why is drawing easier when you draw the shapes of the spaces?
• Why is it important to notice and give importance to the surrounding spaces?

Critique:   Why is drawing easier when you draw the shapes of the spaces?  The problem with drawing chairs and tables, as with many other things we might want to draw, is that we know too much about them.  When a beginning drawing student starts to draw a chair or table, this previously stored, verbal and analytic knowledge contradicts the visual information coming into the brain.  Chairs and tables seen from an oblique angle visually may have none of the attributes we associate with them: square corners appear to be angles, circles appear to be ovals or straight lines, legs may appear to be three or four different lengths.  The struggle is how you reconcile what you know about chairs with what you actually see.