Next issue is, it's too busy. When a painting feels overcrowded or too busy, it usually means there are too many positive spaces and not enough negative spaces. What do I mean by that? Well, let's look at this green piece of paper, I'm gonna put my hand on it. And first I want you to just look at this and most likely, you are looking at my hand and not specifically at the green spaces in between our brain has an easier time looking at what's called positive spaces, which are forms and shapes and the spaces that are in between the spaces in between my fingers that look green. Those are the negative spaces.

So positive and negative isn't really about good, bad. It's just about the forms that we quickly look at first, and then the sort of subordinate form called the negative spaces that support the positive spaces. Now when you have no negative spaces at all in your image, then it tends to feel kind of cramped. The negative spaces act as a I think of a your eyes as taking a canoe ride or a boat ride through a painting. And they ride in the river through the negative spaces. So that you can view the positive spaces.

So the positive spaces or the intense attention getting areas and the negative spaces are the underlying areas that allow you to go from one to the next. It's balancing the positive and negative spaces in your painting that allows the best viewing experience for that image. So let's look again at the hand and the on the green paper. Our brain automatically goes first with the positive space the hand in the fingers. Now if I was to change the spaces between my fingers and ask you To find which space between which fingers is the narrowest. Now while you're staring at this, you would have to actually go change your focus from positive to negative.

And notice that this one is kind of thin, whereas this one is kind of thick. To compare the negative spaces, you actually have to change the way you're looking at something. Rarely do we see positive and negative spaces clearly, both at the same time, we're either looking at one or the other, which means that while you're painting, you have to actually make a conscious effort, especially at first if you're not used to doing this and say, I need to look at the negative spaces in my painting and see how they are see if they're cramped, or if they're too expansive. Let's look at some examples. Here's a painting by Kuro. Normally, in a painting of like this a portrait, a figure the Figure would mean the positive space.

And the whole background would be the negative space. This is a really lovely balance in this piece between positive and negative spaces. And I decided to play around with this and I took the image in Photoshop, and I increased the negative space to such an extent that the figure is really just floating in there. I also took away the detail in the negative space. So I made the negative space, overwhelming and a little boring. Look at the difference between these two images, in terms of the feeling of the figure, the feeling of the person in this landscape.

Here you have a person who's contemplative thinking, sitting there, you know, with some landscape behind her. There's a peacefulness about it. Here, she looks overwhelmed by the expanse. If we had to write a little prose about what she might be thinking in this piece. It would change dramatically. In this one, it's very important to realize that negative spaces when they're too much can feel vacuous and overwhelm the positive spaces.

And when a negative spaces are too scarce too sparse in a painting, then the positive spaces take over and give you a feeling of being too crowded or too busy. Here's a painting in process. That is pretty busy. It's pretty chaotic and pretty busy. There's a lot going on. And we talked about entering a painting from the left and moving in remember that landscape where we moved along the path and spiraled our way back in space?

What do you think? Is there any way of entering this painting? And if so, if we enter it, where are we going? Are we going into an illusionary depth of space in the back? If not, the second idea of space was moving on. Cross to repeated forms.

But the way things are scattered here, we don't really have anything to hold a viewers interest longer than a second of saying too crowded. So one solution we can do in a situation like this, is to say, Well, I would like more illusion of space, I'd like a little bit of breathing room little depth. There's so many positive forms, I'm going to take some positive forms out, and what do I replace them with the negative space, so I have to look at what the background color and mix the background color and take out some forms. So let me pick a form that I'd like to remove here. Well, one thing I'm going to do is, I'm just going to look at the painting for a little bit. And notice that these two shapes here seem to come forward already a little bit.

So to start with that, they make this green look like it goes behind them. And so Then all of a sudden gets cut. And then there's this thing happening here, I'm going to take this blue green color, and I'm gonna see if I can stretch it a little further in places to create more of a background. So I'm going to use this size brush. I think it'll allow me to get into these places. And if not, I could switch to a smaller one later.

And I'm going to start with that blue green color. But to use this fellow blue green shade, and you can see it's bluer. Now I'm going to add some of the yellow green. Pretty close, a little bright, I'm going to take some of this brown here. Let me try it out. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to take out this area right in here.

And instead of saying I'm going to take out this area, what I could say is I'm going to allow this background space to take more prominence over here, I can see that I'm kind of dark. So in general, if you're making Seeing a large amount of color, it's better to mix it with a palette knife. In this case, I'd like to keep changing my color. So I'm just going to get started with the brush and keep going. But like I said, if this was a four foot by six foot painting and I had an area like this, then I would mix the color with a palette knife. Let's see how I'm getting closer here.

I don't know if you've noticed, but mixing color has been so far, our main way of solving a lot of problems. That's kind of kind of close a little bit lighter. I need to make it a little yellower and a little, greener. Blue Sea and I'm just going to see if I can make this space feel a little bit. I'm going to take this guy out here. So sometimes we get attached to everything we paint, and we all want to take it out.

It took me so long to paint it. But we have to look at the big picture and say, well, it's better to take some things out and have what's there remaining feel good and, and add enough space between those forums for a good viewing experience. And I'm gonna just change brushes for a second. So I'm just picking whatever forms I still want here. And already this area is much more breathable. Well, in my opinion and let's see now, I think Give me more space there.

I'm gonna take this whole shape out. Now look how much more breathable it is. And I like to keep changing the color, just adding a little more of whatever was in that mixture as I move along. I think I'll just take that out, see and get a little greener this corner just feels really crowded. So I'm just going to go ahead and notice my like to have brushstrokes instead of always like your washing windows. I like my brushstrokes to move around and not be the same all the time.

And I'll just keep changing the color, but I'm generally keeping the same blue green color because I want it to feel like it's this background. I'm gonna have this little guy floating. I think I'm gonna take all this out too. So as you can see, as I put more and more space between forms, gives them some breathing room and now you can actually relate this with this and that with that, but before it was so jumbled up, I'm just gonna do Little bit more. And then we'll go back to the beginning and compare it to a finished version that I have. Okay, so what I did was just this blue green here.

And I could do, I could do a lot more in here where it's really jammed up. But I do have this piece that's already finished. And that is right here. And if we look at this and go back and get an image of what the piece looked like, before I started making the corrections, let's look at them side by side. Which piece feels like it has more breathing room, not so crammed and crowded, and which one has more space that we could feel has more of a depth of space and a little bit more of an interesting visual ride as we move through the piece. So here is one solution to our problem, it's too busy.

And that is that when you have a piece that feels too busy, see if it has too many positive spaces and not any negative spaces. And your solution would be to eliminate some of those positive spaces that you painted on there by painting over them with what would be the negative space or background areas. Here's another image that I made using the Grand Canyon as inspiration. It has a lot of bright colors, and therefore feels too busy. In the last case, it felt too busy because there was a lack of negative space too many forms crammed together. So I eliminated some here I don't want to eliminate a mountain.

But what I can do is I can change some of the colors from bright to doll and one So do that anything adult is going to look like it goes back in space. So in this case, instead of thinking of it as positive and negative space, and the balance of those here, when I'm looking at is how everything all these bright colors are coming up to this front plane, and there's not much depth of space. So all I need to do is to keep the forms where they are not eliminate any, but change the color of them, I would say in this area here, from the I would like to keep this in the front and the foreground, maybe this little mountain here, and this whole area back here. I would like to mute the colors, make them more gray, and push them back in space.

That's going to give me breathing room going back. So just like before, I'm going to mix colors, and match but a gray version of each one of these here. So I'm going to start with I'm going to think about This staying bright right here, this red. And right behind it this orange and green. I'm going to make them grayer. So actually, I could just start with the same orange color, approximate orange color, like that.

Get it a little better. Something like that. It's not a super bright color, but it's bright enough to create this bouncing off feeling while we're viewing it. And what I'd like is a calmer feeling where this is a foreground and that's a background. So I'm going to take this orange color, and now I'm going to gray it by adding a little bit of black, a little bit of white. A little bit more lips, so easy to add a little too much.

And I'm going to just look at it here and say Hmm, see how it's going. I think I like it because you Even though bright colors are more attractive, I am trying to dull them and make them more neutral. This switch to a smaller brush. And now I'm going to make the same color a little greener. So every time my color changes, I'm going to make a change in this neutral gray color. And we don't work this way.

Make it a lot lighter. And I'd like to keep as before, I'd like to keep changing my color. See this purple color here. I can take purple here. Makes a general range of color for it. And then take some of this gray and gray it out.

Make it a little lighter, too. So here's the purple color. So do you see how I'm changing everything color and keeping the forest the same and keeping the idea of the color purple or orange or green, and yet I'm graying them out. So here I'll go in there and a little green, not turns a little greenish, then it goes back to that orange color. And that's kind of dark. I'm gonna make that a little lighter that gray.

See if I can get him there. I like to just wipe my brush off of the color. And I don't have to rinse it off each time because I am going gray to gray to gray, just a warmer gray, lighter gray cooler gray. So I don't really need to keep rinsing I can just use some of that gray on the brush and just keep adding and changing colors and I'm going to go back to that art. orangey color. See if I can gray that out.

A little close out a little more white. Here's a nice bright green that I'd like to double down. If you just look at this area right away it already even just with this little bit of changes, it's starting to push back and space. I'm just going to do this one area right in there. And then I'm going to show you a fun shortcut. Okay, look at this area next to this.

This bold, hard edge. Bright colors looks like it's coming. forward, and that looks like it's going back this hole. If I did this, this whole area here, it would really push it back in space and give and give a whole new field to the painting. If I took this solution, which is to use opaque paint and apply it over what's there, just changing the color from where it is, whatever hue it is, to a more neutral version of that, and I would be doing that all over. Now I'm going to take this off and show you a shortcut for using a transparent way to gray a neutral neutralizing area.

So I call this an opaque method because all the paint that I mixed is pretty opaque and it covered what was there before, so I'm just gonna wipe it off now. Oh, no. Well, that work. Okay, so now I'm back at the very beginning. Pop colors, everything's competing for Eyespace. And I'm going to do the same solution, but a different way.

I want this whole area to be gray. What I could do is with a palette knife, I could mix a glaze, a transparent gray, apply it all over the whole thing. And because it's transparent, as it goes over the red, it'll just mute the red as it goes over the green. It'll mute the green. So it'll still very, because it's, it's opaque. So I'm going to take it makes a, a light gray.

Let's see. might be kind of dark. I'd like to just take these colors here. So I will make an interesting neutral color out of them. And that looks kind of dark. So make the nice color the way I want it.

Okay, now to make something transparent to make it into a glaze, you have to have a clear medium and I'm using acrylic This is the open acrylic, which means that it's slow drying. And here is the open medium. So if you if you were using oil paint, you could use all kinds of different mediums that are meant for oil painting. Here is the medium. Notice it's white when it's wet, but like most acrylic, it will dry clear. So the only way to make a transparent color is to add the color into the medium.

If I take the medium and just squeeze it out in here, it'll still stay pretty opaque. So I'm going to take this color and mix it in with a medium and now I have a blaze a glaze is nearly 80% clear medium To 20% color in general, I mean a glaze is anything that's a very, very transparent color. And let's just test it, it's hard to tell in a form like that in a puddle. I'm going to use a wide brush wider brush. And I'm just going to test it right here on the top. And go back nice and so I don't know if you can see that in the camera but there is an area that has been subtly muted.

And I am going to now put it over the whole thing though not the whole painting, sorry, just the area that I want pushed back in space. I'm going to go over in excess of where I want to go and then I'll wipe off what I don't want. Just makes it easier. And a nice soft brush allows me to feather it. So that I don't have any streaks. If you have lots of streaks you can do two or three coats.

But every time you do a coat of this it's going to get less and less transparent. You can see less and less of what's underneath. But this turned out to be a pretty good transparency I'm still able to see what's underneath but I am changing it enough to make a visual difference. Now that I finished applying the glaze I can take some paper towel and I can wipe off where I wanted the glaze to not go top. Make this a little crisper. Maybe this mountains days, this mountains days we'll see.

And now it looks to split. This is all gray. This is all bright. So with a clean paper towel. I'm going to just perk it up a little bit in here by adding a little bit of interest. It's not too boring up here.

Huh? Now they're really popping out. So I'm just gonna put a little bit more on. So I'm putting a lighter coat in these areas. Take this off, this is part of that mountain here. Okay, I could play around with this a little bit more, but in general, let's compare.

I actually have a finished version that would be here. And let's compare this finished version with the original that I had before I put the gloves on and you can see the difference in the depth of space. That's created. One feels very very busy and flat. And now by pushing some forms back. Only by muting the colors we have created a lot more breathing room and taken away that problem of it's too busy