If you haven’t, you may want to read the first two parts of the Art Concepts series, Part 1: Texture and Part 2: Composition

In this, the third bite of our feast of art knowledge, I will talk about an elusive concept called positive and negative space. Traditionally, negative space is defined as the “empty” areas within an image. As you will soon see, even that which is empty can be very tangible.

There are three major ways to grow as an artist; to strengthen your aesthetic senses and the quality of your work:

• Emulate the work of artists you admire,

• Experiment on your own, exploring the subject matter that interests you, and

• Participate in critique

Emulation is very common, especially when getting started in art, and exploring subject matter of interest to you essentially describes doing art, so I’m sure you do that already. Critique, however, is where many artists are weakest.

It’s not so much that flash photography is actually complex, but more that the available information tends to skip the fundamentals. In short, I love Strobist very much (and I’m not alone), but I felt left in the dark (pun intended) about a couple of small items after reading a recent post and I felt I should share the answers I came up with.

This article is part of a series; you may want to start at the beginning: Part 1: Texture, or continue to Part 3: Positive/Negative Space.

Because this is only the second part in my Art Concepts series, I want to study the more general and fundamental stuff first. In the last episode, we looked at texture. Texture is a fairly specific element, so today I thought I would take a big step back and talk about composition.

When we say “composition,” we refer not only to the relative locations of the points of interest in a piece (which is the most discussed aspect), but also to their sizes, shapes, colors, and other variables that contribute to the balance (or imbalance) of the work. That’s what we’re going to look at today.

It’s really been a long time since I’ve posted! I must apologize to you, my faithful readers, for this unusually long silence. A lot has been going on! Let me bring you up to speed.

First, you may have noticed that just about one week ago my sites went down for a full 24 hours. Apparently my web host suffered some kind of a networking problem, though they weren’t able to be more specific. To make a long story short, I was completely displeased with their handling of the situation and so I began putting things in motion to switch to a more credible host. Right now I have secured a new hosting environment and I am in the process of configuring it and getting ready to migrate my sites over.