Introduction to Design - Page 8

Exercise

1. Take a 9 x 12 inch or 22.9 x 30.5 cm pad a paper and a pencil and begin to trace the out line of your hand. I don't mean slap your hand on a piece of paper and make a turkey, I mean observe your left hand or if your left handed your right hand and just draw the contour of your hand, the out line of the hand. Do not sketch your hand in little lines but slowly and methodically draw the outline. Make sure you pay attention to all the slight detail of you hand such as finger nails the rise and fall of you knuckles. Do not add any detail such as hair or shading. This should be one continues line from one edge of the paper around the hand and off the paper again. This will give a basic shape of the hand, it may look distorted and strange but what you are doing is training your eye to see the basic shape of an object.
2. Once you have done six hands of different positions take and get some black construction paper and cut them out of the black paper.
3. Save both the hand and its outline. Now take and place the hands and their outlines on a piece of white paper you have both a positive hand and a negative hand. Notice the different feelings the same shape can invoke.
4. Now arrange them on the sheet of 18 x24 inch or 45.7 x 61 cm drawling paper and try and bring balance and harmony into the piece.

If you do not have the paper you could also try this in PhotoShop by masking an object so you have its basic shape and also have the reverse of it. Make them black in value. Remember we don't want to see the detail in the pictures just the basic shape. This will give the same effect.