CHAPTER 5: EXPLORING NEGATIVE-POSITIVE DRAWING: AN EXPERIMENT

Abstract

INTRODUCTION
Drawing as a form of art does not cease in the use of lines to make a picture on a two-dimensional surface, but also includes the use of colours, tone and other elements, added with lines to make representation on a flat surface. In fact, throughout the history of visual representation, humans explored various unconventional materials in creating drawings on various surfaces.  Palaeolithic drawings between 10,000 to 25,000 B.C. were discovered on cave walls and roofs in Nothern Africa and Southern European Countries such as in Lascaux,  Dordogne and Chauvet Cave in Ardeche Valley both in France. “The famous wall paintings at Lascaux, in Dordogne include a wide range of animal species and a few human stick figures painted with earth coloured pigments – brown, black, yellow and red. They are ground from ocher, hematite and manganese and applied to the natural white limestone surfaces of the walls. The Lascaux artists created their Figures by drawing an outline and filling it with pigment (Adams, 2000 p. 25). Those images were assumed to be their day-to-day experiences.  
Many civilizations utilised drawing in bringing various art projects into reality. Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Dark Age Artists, Rennaissance, Pop and modern artists employed drawing with miscellaneous materials in expressing their styles. Over the years, so many materials have been put to use in drawing. From a preliminary study carried out via interviews and observation, the student artists of the Department of Fine and Applied Arts of Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria, have exhausted the use of common materials such as pencils, oil and chalk pastels, crayons, ink and brush, in creating drawings. Thus there is a need to explore unconventional materials in making drawings. Among such drawing effects is inverted drawing. Inverted drawing involves making a visual representation on a black surface with white material, creating a sharp contrast to the dark background in lines. Example of such type of drawing is Scrapeboard and Silverpoint techniques.  Such techniques are less prevalent in some departments and art schools in Nigeria because of a lack of materials. Correction pen is a prospective material for drawing because of its ability to make continuous markings. In making corrections to writing errors, correction pens are a handy and simple instrument. These pens have an ink, marker, or mistake covering fluid that dries quickly, enabling a seamless repair of errors on paper. This research hereby explores experimental drawing, with materials such as black cardboard papers and correction pen and ink to create various genres of drawings such as portrait, landscape, still life, scenes and the human figure. Again, the research will deploy the Photoshop application as a tool to invert the outcome of the research into positive replicas, thereby attaining varieties in materials.