What Is Negative Painting and Why It's A Crucial Skill In Watercolor Painting

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Watercolor presents us with some unique challenges.

One of them is that we paint in reverse compared to other mediums: we paint lightest values to darkest values. Since we don't really have the luxury of being able to paint in our lightest values last over the top of dark value, it is important to develop the skill of negative painting.

Negative painting is using shapes around another shape to define that shape. So instead of painting an object, we're defining the object by painting the shapes around that object.

One of our challenges is in every wash that we're doing, we have to ask ourselves, what part of this wash am I going to cover up? What part am I going to leave behind when I do my next wash? Then at each stage, I have to remember to paint around that area. And that's a tricky skill that takes some practice to get right.

If you can embrace negative painting, it can bring a nice quality of looseness to your work. There's an imperfection there that you don't get when you paint a positive shape. And the more you practice these things, the more that negative painting will become natural to you.

Видео What Is Negative Painting and Why It's A Crucial Skill In Watercolor Painting канала Matthew White - Watercolor Instruction