Painting Trees - III

Landscape painter Jan Schmuckal takes yet another approach to painting landscapes – and painting trees, but one that also pays close attention to negative spaces. In this time-lapse demonstration video, Painting Demo, which you can find on YouTube, she begins by toning the entire canvas in a deep brown wash.

Next, she removes paint with a Q-tip, creating the basic lines of her composition. While she uses oil paints, which don't dry as quickly as acrylics, Open Acrylics, which have a longer drying time, would allow you to try this method using acrylics.

Next, she removes the color in areas that are going to be light – in this case, the sky and the sky's reflection in the water below – in other words, in the negative spaces. She defines the trees by removing anything that isn't tree....

Notice how she removes paint inside the tree, for the spaces where the light shows through? (Napa Valley painter Vicki Long calls them "sky holes.")

Once the shapes of her composition are established, Schmuckal then comes in with a brush and paint, bringing color and increased light into the dark areas.

Next she further defines the trees by painting the negative spaces around them – the sky, and its light.

Once the light in the sky is established, she returns to the trees, bringing lighter values to the leaves and branches. Throughout, however, she keeps the shapes simple – the details she adds never detract from whole. There is no element of fussiness here – there is, instead a wonderful sense of place, of light and dark, of atmosphere....

And here is the final painting!

You can see the complete video at Painting Demo on YouTube, and you can see more of Jan's paintings on her gallery website (Gallery 28 in Geneva, Illinois). You can also follow Jan at her Facebook page, Jan Schmuckal Tonalist Impressionist Artist. You can also buy her paintings on eBay, at Gallery 28 Originals Jan Schmuckal. I hope you'll follow the links through to discover more of her work – it will be well worth your time.

Remember negative space?

Trees in fog south of Napa • © 2011 Karen Lynn Ingalls

It's good, every now and then, to review some of the basics that are critical in developing a good composition. If you have a tendency to think, when you paint, mostly in terms of the subject, and not so much of the space around the subject, revisiting the concepts of negative space will help your painting enormously.

And if this is new to you, you will be amazed at how an understanding of negative (and positive) space will change the way you see – and the way you paint.

Here are two posts from 2010 on negative space that will help.

Negative space – it's not just background

Karl Blossfeldt's use of positive and negative space

Winter is a wonderful time to practice seeing negative space. Take a look at the shapes of trees in fog – study the shapes of oak trees or grapevines without their leaves. Notice the shapes of the trees and vines themselves – and notice the spaces around them. In a painting, you can use the negative space to shape the positive space in ways that make both work better.

Robert Genn and The Painter's Keys

Robert Genn painting on location. His caption for this photo reads, "I didn't like the look of that Toyota over there so I left it out."

Robert Genn is a Canadian plein air landscape painter who works in acrylics, lives in British Columbia, and travels throughout the world painting.

Twice a week he sends out a thoughtful email newsletter, a letter musing on something to do with art, the act of painting, the process of creativity, the business side of art, or life as it applies to art and artists generally. Artists from all over the world respond, and he posts some of the responses, with artwork, on his newsletter's website, www.painterskeys.com.

Robert Genn's painting in process, beginning with the big shapes

In his post, Light and Shade, Genn writes about painting boats on location, thoughtfully explaining and demonstrating his process. He blocks in "general shapes and patterns early on, while keeping only a partial eye on the eventual lay of the light. In other words, the strongest light areas go in at about the half-way stage of the painting." Notice how he is thinking in terms of the big shapes? He's not concerned with details, even the details of light and shadow, as he begins.

Robert Genn's painting, the next step – addressing the negative shapes

Then he sharpens things up by painting the negative shapes, seen clearly in the sky. Notice how he uses the sky to shape the masts and railings of the boats? You can see the photos online above his post "The divided self," from October 29, 2010.

Robert Genn's painting in process, through to framing

His final steps, as he puts it, are "strengthening design, heightening colours, gradating sky," and finally, "Get it stopped and think about it in a frame."

You can enjoy Robert Genn's newsletters twice a week, too, as I have for a good bit over ten years now, by subscribing at his website at www.painterskeys.com.

You can also watch short time-lapse videos of him taking a painting from start to finish, on YouTube, at www.youtube.com/use/painterskeys. (Notice how he uses a glaze of phthalo blue rubbed across the whole painting, as a mother color, to bring everything into color harmony?)

Carol Marine painting demonstration

Daily painter Carol Marine creates a small still life painting, of a bell pepper, in the instruction video Carol Marine Daily Painting Demo. She paints on a canvas with a yellow underpainting, and begins by making marks indicating the outer edges of the pepper and its shadow. Next, she draws in the shapes of her composition. Nice use of the negative space, isn't it?

Once her composition is laid out, she begins blocking in the big shapes of her painting, both in the positive and negative space.

She paints quickly (she's had a lot of practice). Notice how she uses her brush strokes in the negative space to help define the positive shapes?

Notice how she moves from larger shapes to smaller ones as she develops the painting? The lovely details of highlights and small shadows on the pepper and its stem work well, because the structure of the composition underneath it works.

You can see more of her artwork online at bluecloudstudios.com, and you can read her blog at carolmarine.blogspot.com.

Karl Blossfeldt's use of positive and negative space

Karl Blossfeldt, Silphium laciniatum, Compass-plant, leaf dried on stem (magnified 5 times)

Karl Blossfeldt was in his sixties when his botanical photographs were first published, in Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature), in 1928. His work was both popular and influential, being republished internationally in a number of editions, and influencing both architects and decorative artists of his time. You can see many of his images on one page here.

Karl Blossfeldt, Adiantum pedatum, American maidenhair fern (magnified 8 times)

He worked as a photographer in late-nineteenth century Berlin, where he taught design at the School of Decorative Arts. His photographs are all close-ups of plant forms and features – but the negative spaces make them work.

Karl Blossfeldt, Cucurbita, Tendrils of the pumpkin (magnified 4 times)

Thank you to Brigitta Wiederhold for introducing me to Blossfeldt's work!

Negative space - it's not just background

The phrase "negative space" doesn't mean what you might think. If you're painting an apple, and someone talks about the apple's negative space, it does not actually mean that the apple's emotional state is dire. In art, negative space refers to the space around the apple.

People, animals, objects – all occupy space. We have form, shape, and weight. When you put images of us into two dimensions, we are positive space. So the apple is positive space – or a positive shape. The space around it is negative space (or negative shape).

Another word for positive space is "figure." The apple, in a painting of it, is the figure.

The negative space – the space around the apple – is also called the ground. If it's the ground in front, it's the foreground; if it's the ground in back, it's the background. Makes sense, right?

But the word background implies it's not important. It also implies that you paint it first, and then slap that apple right on top of it. If you do that, you'll have a painting of an apple slapped on top of a background. Bor-ing....

The thing to remember is that the positive and negative space are equally important in making the composition work. The negative shapes need to be interesting – not an afterthought. It's kind of like music – the notes wouldn't work without the silences between them.

Georgia O'Keeffe's Pears

Here is a simple painting of two pears by American painter Georgia O'Keeffe (1887 - 1986). Although it's not the kind of image we usually associate with her – the close-up paintings of flowers, or images of cow skulls or Southwestern landscapes – it has the same kind of simplicity and monumental feeling as her more familiar work.

Notice how she uses multiple shadows as compositional elements? They ground the pears in the white space, and they help relate the pears to the edges of the white cloth (I assume it's a cloth resting on a table). Without them, those wonderfully solid, modeled pears would float in the white space.

Notice how the cloth's edges are tilted, giving the painting a dynamic feeling? O'Keeffe uses this to create strong and interesting negative spaces. There is still no doubt that those lovely pears are the focal point of the painting. Why? It's partly because the shadows lessen the contrast between the edge of the cloth and the dark table beneath it; partly because she has lightened the shadow around the pear stems, creating greater contrast between them and the white of the cloth; and partly because the shapes of the pear tops and stems are so interesting.

You can see more of Georgia O'Keeffe's work, and read about her life and her homes at www.okeeffemuseum.org.