Letters by Lydia: Positive and Negative Space

Happy Wednesday everyone!  This week I wanted to talk about using positive and negative space.  If you don’t already know what that is, or need a quick refresher, here’s an example:

Positive space is the thing itself, and negative space is the lack of the thing, or what’s around it.  On the left, you can see that the “Hi” is written using negative space, because the color exists all around it, but the letters themselves are empty.  On the right, the “Hi” is an example of positive space, because it is the thing itself (by contrast, the white all around it is negative space).

This is something a lot of artists make use of, or at least are aware of, and the lettering community is a part of that too!

I was feeling inspired by spring (despite the icky weather today), so I drew some more in-depth pieces involving flowers that use positive and negative space.

Which one do you like better?  I hope you all have a great week and hopefully we’ll start to see some flowers blooming soon 🙂

Evolving Emotions: Spring

Crunch and fragility

Dull brown and lifeless

A flower

Killed by cold

A horrendous annual crime

 

But upon a newfound strength

By the Earth’s nurturing scape

A blooming begins

 

Inaction and then

Elation at a new

Motion in the ground

Abolition of the lifelessness of yesterday

Captivation of colors. The

Transformation beneath. A

Foundation of weaving threads. An

Interconnection of the greatest

Creation brought along by the spring

Resurrection

 

 

Spring DIY

Spring officially started March 20th of this year, but it does not feel like it.  The weather is still cold and occasionally Ann Arbor gets some snow. Until it starts to feel like spring, here are some DIY crafts to do to at least make it feel like spring in your house.

Succulents have been a big trend over the past couple years.  Even though you only have to water them once a week or so, that can be easy to forget.  To solve this problem, and to always have a succulent in your house to remind you of spring you can make one yourself.  All you need is a flower

 pot, pebbles, five or six normal size rocks, and some green and white paint. First decorate the flower pot however you want.  Then you paint the big rocks in the green paint, you can also buy several different shades of green to have a variety of succulents in your pot. Once the paint dries, draw small diagonal lines on the rock to make it look like the prickles on a cactus.  On other cactus’ you can draw polka dots and stars to have a variety. Then you place the pebbles in the flower pot as a base and arrange the cactus rocks in the pebbles to make them look like succulents. Then the only thing left to do is to find a spot in your house to display this wonderful spring reminding diy.

Another diy to make your house more springy, is to make a wall fixture of a mason jar string art flower vase.  This sounds much more complicated than it is. The supplies you need are: a small piece of wood, white string, nails, and fake flowers.  This first thing to do is to hammer the nails into the wood in theshape that you want your flower holder. You can make it any shape, like a wicker or wire basket, or the easiest being a mason jar.  If you need to, you can look up a stencil of a mason jar and nail into the spots that it tells you. After the nails are in place, you wrap the string around each nail once or twice like your playing connect the dots.  Once you reach the end, you can tie a knot with the string so that the entire picture won’t fall apart. The last thing to do it to staple your fake flowers so that the stem is inside the jar and the top flower part is sitting just on top of the jar.  Then you just move the stem to be under the string that you just wrapped around the nails, and your done! You can hang this on your wall and pretend like the real flowers outside have also bloomed.