Day Three: Focus on Negative Spaces

The reason that we draw negative spaces is because our minds don't have any stored preconceptions of these weird shapes, and if we have to draw them, it forces us to really look. That was the lesson of my morning class today. Like yesterday, we had a live model to draw, but instead of many short sketches, we focused on one long piece for the entire 3 hours. The goal of the piece was to draw only the negative spaces of the model (like between her legs) and the the background (like between the legs of the desks and chairs). It was really challenging because I found it difficult to find the major points on her body without drawing the whole shape. Interior negative spaces were much easier than the unconfined spaces surrounding her body. After finishing the pencil drawing, the negative spaces were filled in with black gouache. I really like the finish of dried gouache; it has a velvety texture that is beautiful. I really enjoyed this piece. I think it looks really interesting, but also, the practice of drawing the ground spaces to create the figure "exercised muscles" that I don't use often.

My negative/postive space drawing

During lunch, we had a lecture  a design professor from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a recent graduate from the Design and Communications program at Parsons. Ellen, the professor, talked a lot about the message and how much a simple geometric symbol needs to convey in order to be effective. Sofia, who graduated in May, told us about her senior thesis, the road to creating a design campaign, and what it's like to work as a graphic designer (at least as an intern). After hearing Sofia speak about her experiences, I think that I would really enjoy a career in graphic design and marketing. I asked her about the application process, and she told me that her portfolio was composed mainly of fine art pieces. I think studying graphic design and being able to apply my skills in a more accessible way is a really practical academic and future career move for me, especially because Parsons seems to have such an inclusive program.

Creating a color palette from an inspiration picture in
photoshop

In the afternoon, Frank (attempted) to teach us how to use photshop and adobe illustrator. I say attempted because honestly, I didn't really know what I was doing. I've never used either program before, and I also don't know how to use Macs very well. One thing that I did pick up was how to fix the exposure of photographs, and how to make the exposure level consistant throughout a series of pictures. I understood how that process worked, however, when we began using illustrator to "trace" and "expand" pictures, I lost the train of instruction a little bit. I suppose that digital design skills will come with practice; I just have to practice a lot while I'm here because photoshop is way out of budget and I don't plan on getting it on my personal laptop.

Tomorrow is the fourth of July, and I'm so glad that we have a day off. Friday's class is going to be really interesting too because we're going to the Met to draw.