Instead of thinking about fingers, nails, knuckles, start by looking at the shapes between the fingers.

Negative space is very useful when confronted with 'difficult' subjects, such as hands. Use Negative Space to Turn the Familiar into Something New If you look at the picture above, you immediately recognize that it's an angle-poise lamp, but notice that nothing of the lamp itself has been painted, only the shapes or negative space around it. Often by working from the negative spaces rather than focusing on the object, you end up with a much more accurate painting. By changing your focus away from the mug and to the negative spaces – such as the space between the handle and the mug, and the space underneath the handle and the surface the mug is sitting on – you have to concentrate on what's in front of you and can't work on 'autopilot'. So, for example, when painting a mug, we start thinking 'I know what a mug looks like' and don't observe the precise angles of that particular mug.

Instead of painting what is in front of us, we paint what we know and remember about the subject. Too often when we paint something, we stop observing and start painting from memory. Negative space is a useful technique for accurate observation. It becomes very evident when the image is reversed. The classic example is the brain-teaser where depending on how you look you see either a vase or two faces (as shown in the image above). What's left of the door is the negative space, that is the space around the object, in this case, Bugs Bunny. What you'll see in the cartoon is a door with a bunny-shaped hole in it. Imagine Bugs Bunny speeding along and running through a door.

In her book Drawing on the Right Hand Side of the Brain Betty Edwards uses a great Bugs Bunny analogy to explain the concept. Studying this can have a surprisingly positive effect on a painting. Negative space is the space between objects or parts of an object, or around it. Negative space isn't the place your mind retreats to when a painting isn't going well.

Paintings with negative space