Holiday Painting in the Negative

Since the holidays are upon us and I am due to teach a workshop on negative painting on Saturday, December 8, at the City of Brea Art Gallery (call them for details or to sign up), I decided to try to paint poinsettias with all negative painting. Besides, they are my favorite color, red! My goal was to see if it were possible for me to do the entire painting in the negative.

(I do wish there were a different term for negative painting -- it just sounds so, um, negative. Especially for a holiday painting. Gerald Brommer's term, painting the unoccupied space, is a bit unwieldy.)

Anyway, I started my underpainting by wetting the paper and putting three yellow dots in the upper left. Then I slathered on all my different reds wet-into-wet in sort of poinsettia leaf shapes, so I suppose there was some degree of positive painting in the underpainting. I added bits of green to make the red pop and bits of yellow so that those three dots were not alone. I also lifted out some leaf veins with a small, almost dry brush. After letting the underpainting dry, I began negatively painting with reds darkened with green and greens darkened with red to bring out the flower shape. And here it is:

Holiday Flower

Right now I am thinking of changing my lesson plan for Saturday a bit so that I can include teaching what I did to make this holiday painting. We'll see how that works out .......