Free Drawing Lesson: Improve Accuracy with Negative Space.

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Did you know that you can improve the accuracy of your drawings by focusing on the negative space instead of the actual object? In this free drawing lesson, I'll show you how.

First, a quick refresher of what negative space is.

Negative space is basically just the space around an object. That's all. Here is an example.

Now I'll highlight the negative space in red.

Here it is without the figure. Again, the red part is the negative space.

Okay, now let's talk about how to use negative space to actually increase the accuracy of your drawings.

What most people do is just draw the figure or object. When you do this, things tend to get misplaced since you don't really have a good way of judging where they should be.

In this example, the left arm might be placed at the wrong angle or too far down on the figure. There are lots of things that could happen.

So, let's see what happens if we draw just the negative space. Since this is a free drawing lesson and not one of my complete lessons, I'll won't be able to go into too much detail. But, I'll give you enough to get you started.

Here is that same drawing. This time, I focused on the negative space inside the left arm.

The negative space shape is odd. If we simplify it, it resembles a triangle. Most negative space shapes will be a little bit abstract like this.

Here's what to do. Draw that negative space shape. Pretend like the figure isn't even there.

What does this do? Well, you can now check the accuracy of the drawing in two ways. One, you can look at the arm and the back to see if it looks right. And Two, you can check the shape of the negative space area. You now have doubled your chance of getting that area of the figure drawn correctly.

Start doing this with whatever you draw and you'll start noticing an immediate improvement with the accuracy of your figures.

I hope you enjoyed this free drawing lesson. You can use the example above for practice. Also, if you are wondering, this is a figure drawing that I drew based on a figure by Rafael. Old masters have lots of good figures to work from.

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