Rain's TAD: Space

 

It's Thursday, so that means it's time to show my contribution to Rain's weekly Thursday Art Date.  This week the theme is Space.  I may have taken a different view of space this week.

 When I taught the altered book class (see my right sidebar), one of the elements we touched on was Space.  I defined space as the distance or area between, around, above, below, or within shapes and forms. Shapes can be arranged in space in many ways, such as in rows, overlapping, or by size to show distance.

I tried to show this in the city-scape I created above.

 

Both positive and negative space are important factors in every good composition. Positive Space is created by any main element appearing to be in front of the background. Negative Space is the area that surrounds the shapes. They occur in both two-dimension and three-dimension art and complement one another. One impacts the other.

Positive space is the "occupied" areas in a work of art that is filled with something such as lines, colors, and/or shapes. It is the primary subject matter of a painting and a collage. It is the part of your spread that forms your area-of-interest. It dominates the eye and is the focal point in the composition.

 

What was hard for some to understand was negative space.  Negative space is called white space in journal and AB layouts. It is the unoccupied areas that surround the subject matter. It is more passive and is defined by the edges of the positive space it surrounds. It is what gives definition to our composition and layouts.

Negative space is important in any AB spread because it gives balance to positive space by giving the eye a place to rest. This is a basic element that is often overlooked as a principle of a good design. Sometimes we are so focused to get everything on the page, we overlook the fact the eye needs that all important resting place.

 

This is SO much easier to see and comprehend as negative space than the positive space image above, even though they were created basically in the same way. 

Although both of the above are examples of positive and negative space in my rocking horse AB, you can see how different the space around the image is perceived and the impact it creates. It is SO much easier to "read" the second image, than it is the first.

 

There is also perceived 3-D space.  3-D illusions or cues occur when a sensation of space which seems to have height, width, and depth are visually created through various techniques. These illusions of 3-D space include overlapping objects, changing the size and placement of related objects, linear perspective, atmospheric perspective, along with color hues and values.

The easiest way to create the illusion of 3-D space is overlapping objects.  Returning to my Rocking Horse AB, I tried to show this overlap.  The effect was achieved by allowing the contour of one rocking horse to be interrupted by the contour of another, so it looked like one rocking horse was physically sitting in front of the other. Those of you who are stampers may have stamped more than one image (as I did above) by masking the first, then stamped the second time with the mask in place. You have created that same 3-D illusion!

Putting the altered book lessons aside, I called this my Space Saver Space Cadet.  This was for a challenge at Art Journal Journey.

Space was represented in another Art Journal Journey entry.  In case you need the interpretation:

July 19, 1969

That is one small step for man
and has practically been
forgotten after 50 years.

I had hoped to be traveling in space in my golden years, but it appears that will never happen.  When did we forget how important space exploration was?  Was it when Apollo 13 wasn't even covered on television until the lives of the crew were suddenly in danger?  Was it after Apollo 11, people gave up caring because we had "conquered" the moon?  What caused us to lose interest so quickly?  I'm hoping the new Mars project will spark our interest in space again, especially young people.

Now for a few photos.

I'm so proud of our Cosmosphere, which has even more authentic space artifacts than the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.  In fact, the Smithsonian has outsourced projects to the Cosmosphere because the researchers and workers are so capable of repairing and lovingly handling the pieces.

I've visited the museum several times.

Space, the final frontier.  A bit of Star Trek to end this week's look at how I treated Rain's Space Thursday Art Date.

All photos taken by me, all art created by me.  Bleubeard wants me to remind Squiggles to stay out of his space.

 

Thank you ever so much for stopping by.  I am truly grateful to you, my friends, followers, readers, and lurkers for visiting.  Please also join me at Rain's Thursday Art Date.