Sophie Ashdown

Continuing my challenge to create new art every day for 30 days…

The prompt for day 17 was “Make a care package for someone who cares for you.” This didn’t seem relevant to what I was planning for this day so I ignored it.

Increasingly I have been experimenting with positive and negative space, so I wanted to create something along those lines, but in keeping with my overall aesthetic.

Somewhat inspired by a monochrome piece I made a few weeks ago based on some wrapping paper (see here), I created this piece:

I really enjoyed making this piece. To start with I drew the squares in even sizes across the A5 card, then I drew circles and rectangles randomly across the canvas. I tried to have an interesting number of shapes that would cut across the different squares.

Once that was complete I started colouring in the shapes to make positive/negative space across the squares. It was a very enjoyable process. (Shoutout to the Faber Castell Pitt Artist Pen Brush in black which was so amazing for this task!)

It was so satisfying to see the end result of this piece. I really like it and could see it working in a larger scale. What would be really interesting would be to make a much larger piece but keep the squares in a small size, so if there are 24 squares in an A5 size piece, there would be 48 in A4, 96 in A3, 182 in A2 size, etc. It could make for quite a striking piece, but would take a long time!

I feel that this piece would fit into a Constructivist style. We have the straight lines, solid shapes, and cohesive pattern. This is something that I would put up on my wall in a larger size, which for me is obviously a good measure for whether I like it or not!