Tip #17 Negative painting

Negative painting is at the centre of what I do, how I paint. It's often where the fun is or where the tricky stuff comes in. When someone paints the sky first and then the land  and then paints the trees and the houses on top, that's called positive painting. When someone starts with an underpaint (covering the entire canvas with a given colour, and mine is a kind of quidacridone red), then draws in the shapes with little attention to details (I do it in black) but then comes in, per example, with the blue of the sky to form the shape of the trees, or the colour of the rocks to outline the grasses near by, that's called negative painting. Tom Thompson was a negative painter and I once read that his Group of 7 friends complained that he was grumpy because he always had to paint the space (sky)  between all the leaves and branches, which was tricky and sometimes tedious. But I so enjoy creating shapes with a loose version of negative painting, leaving a fair bit of the underpainting showing up beside the shapes. These little unpainted areas are called Holidays. Cute, isn't it?

Made it to the tunnel 16x20