One of the things that I noticed about our abstract drawing projects was that students tended to keep the object in one big lump in the center of the page. I'm planning on revisiting that project later in the quarter after addressing this and a couple of other issues. To teach them about negative space I showed them two images of decagons. One regular and one in the star shape. I explained that the star is more interesting because it has the points breaking out into the negative space. Then we used scissors to cut different shapes out of a square and then mounted them so that they broke outside of the square and into the negative space. I think this might have been a little simple for high school student work but it demonstrated the idea really well and it seemed to click with the students so I'm hopping this will make a big impact on their subsequent drawings.
