A Look at Painting Negatively With Corel Painter 12

Painting Negatively Adds New Dimensions to Your Paintings

Painting negatively in a digital environment is a different process than doing it in traditional mediums such as watercolour of acrylic. It is a technique that I have longed to master because it's easy to see how it allows you to add depth and interest to your composition. The dynamic relationship between shape and space has always been an important consideration when composing.

One way of looking at it is to think of the process as an Additive and Subtractive method of painting the negative spaces in your painting to create more positive shapes.

It is rather complicated, especially digitally becasue we have the ability to do so much more with all our layers, rather than just applyin them one by one and letting them dry in between like you do in traditional watercolours.

I am learning some of the things I can do to these layers to add a new dimension to my paintings in Summer Open Studio at Digital Art Academy. In the process I get to meet lots more artists who love digital painting as much as I do! Loads of fun!

In my last post Taking My First Online Art Course is a Great Experence So Far!

I posted some great work by some fellow students Kathy Pilgrim and Skip Allen.

An Invitation to Post Your Work:

If anyone else taking this course with me would like their assignments posted in this blog post, just email me about it! :)

How I Painted Midnight Garden Using Negative Painting Techniques

It is not as detailed as some of my tutorials because I didn't plan to use it that way when I was painting it. It's mostly to give an example of how you could do it.

Midnight Garden Sketch - Joan A Hamilton

I chose this sketch because I wanted to try something that didn't have to have too many layers to get the point across. I could have painted it without using this technique because it's basically a layering technique which I use all the time anyway.

The difference is that I didn't have to worry about going outside the lines so much.

Midnight Garden - The Watercolour Layers - Joan A Hamilton

As you can see in the illustration I now have 5 Watercolour Layers. They don't differ vastly in colour, but you could virtually use any colours you wanted. The yellow in WC 2 is slightly greener than the one in WC 1. I only painted the leaf shape on this layer which is really positive painting. I got lazy and decided I didn't want to have to erase so much. lol!

Midnight Garden - Paint Around the Leaves With Blue - Joan A Hamilton

I turned WC 2 and 3 off to make this easier to see. The next step I used was to paint the area around the leaves with blue on a new WC Layer. WC Lyer 6 is a little positive painting on the leaf veins in the center leaf. (Not enough was on WC layer 4 to cover them all for me to erase around them.. oops - lousy planning Joan!)

Midnight Garden -The Blue Layers - Joan A Hamilton

Layers 2, 3 and 4 were painted with a DWC Pointed Simple Water and blended with a custom DWC Soft Blender, which actually takes quite a bit of the paint off.

Unfortunately I stopped saving screen shots after this point because I Cloned the document which drops all the layers just to try something and kept on going on my cloned document for too long to go back and repeat it on my previous layered document. Hope I haven't misssed any important steps.

Next I added some dark blues to the sky, erased a little in places to let some light through.
Then I used Splashing Water Wet Pencil Blender with a pale blue to wet some areas in the sky to give it some texture.
Then I used the salt eraser with the jitter turned off to put in 'a few' sparkly stars.
Dropped the layers to canvas and used a Glow brush to highlight the light in the focal point area.
Finally used one of Skip's new RW Brushes - a splat to put some very light turquoise mottled texture on the leaves.

Bottom right leaf had some DWC fringe edges added on the veins to emphasize them and give them a more watercoloury look. Also added some WC Diffuse Camel to darken and give some texture.

Drop to canvas, use a Wet Confsuion Fx brush set to Multi to blend some of your wet tiny drops in the dark sky. It will subtly add a little more texture. You will need to lift the canvas back to WC Layer again and wet slightly
Adjust your Brightness and Contrast