These are two drawings that I made on the iPad ten months apart – one in August 2022, the other this June.
I’ve always been fascinated by negative space in drawings. As a comics creator, I think negative space defines how we approach storytelling. It’s not just gaps in the art – how we draw the eye and where – negative space is fundamental to writing a comic too. Scott McCloud talks about this as closure – someone looking at the space between panels and filling in what happens there.
So when it comes to drawing, it was always important for me to understand structure enough that I could deploy negative space. Every week, I try to do at least one drawing using undepicted space.
My main inspirations on how to approach this are probably Bill Sienkiewicz, Brian Stelfreeze, and more recently Greg Smallwood.
With Titas, I think I did okay with the legs and the shoes, and maybe even with part of her left hand (the one on our right), but both her hands and the space around her right hand – I don’t think I knew how to approach that.
The Stephanie drawing I’m much happier with. For one thing, by this point I understand that flat space needs to be contrasted with rendered structure. I’m also combining screentone with actual shading to add a light-to-dark variance to the shadow.1
I had also been looking at an artist on Instagram (I can’t remember who at this moment – I’ll edit this bit if I find them) who combines very bold outer lines with delicate structural lines inside.
I think the bold lines, the rendering, and the pose itself (in the original photo reference, Stephanie was posing against a black background wearing a black skirt with a pattern on it) combine to create interesting shapes that are nevertheless very clear.
It’s nice to see verifiable progress in a matter of months.
- I will say though that the shading on her left leg isn’t well-rendered – I wasn’t happy with it while I was drawing either. ↩︎
