DAY 15 - Back to the Drawing Board, White Space

 

I remember the first time someone outside of my family noticed I could draw. I remember because it was also the first time someone critiqued my work.

Class time wrapped up a little early one day and our third grade teacher encouraged us to color or read for the remainder of the afternoon. I pulled out crayons and a piece of tan construction paper and proceeded to copy a picture from a science magazine. It was a bumblebee hovering over a white daisy. The photo depicted the bee and flower against a blue sky. But the picture I drew was a bit different. Instead of coloring in an edge-to-edge blue background, I left a rough, untouched boundary around the flower and the bee. I was trying for a look similar to something I’d seen in a reading book: clean, black-line drawings inked with simple color fills and set against watercolor wash backgrounds. The background colors did not touch the characters. It was different and I liked the printed look of the illustrations.
My 3rd grade teacher, though, had a different opinion. Passing among the desks of her busy students, she stopped for a moment at mine. I had put my crayons down and she inquired if I was going to finish the picture. I replied that I was done. She responded that I should finish coloring in the blue sky so that all the edges were filled in. I was hurt. But before I could comply the bell rang and it was time to board the buses. I hurriedly stuffed my piece in my folder with my day’s papers and took it home.
My mother kept that drawing for years. I never filled in those white spaces. I just couldn’t do it. To do so would mean filling in a picture as someone else saw it, not as I saw it.
This is a facsimile of what I remember from my original picture. Notice there’s plenty of white space and, in this drawing, no sky at all! I figure I’ll rework this drawing a bit (no color, lines only) and then print it out and let my grandkids color it in -- as they see fit.