Joe “The Artist” Paints & Sketches

This quote from Longfellow[1] best describes the effect achieved in the painting exercise below that uses only three colors to get greens and browns, (I came upon this exercise in a video,) which takes positive shapes to generate negative shapes.  There are two ways for you to see the negative shapes: one is to squint while you look at the painting or change from your left brain to your right brain.  Colors used: cadmium red, pthalo blue and yellow ochre. 

Notice the movement of color from the bottom to the top.  In the process, I lost the greens.  However, this did not total the idea of using positive shapes to generate the negative shapes.  This technique, in some cases will require a background that is not white, in order to reduce the starkness of the negative shapes generated.  In addition, one can shift (shape shifters) the shapes from positive to negative.  For example, as the trees go towards the sky, one can paint the tree against the sky, rather than the other way around.

Fig. 1 Positive to Negative.