Negative and positive spaces

Hi!

Thanks to Sian for those fab inspiring projects :)

If you're looking for a starting point for your papercrafting projects over the weekend how about having a play with positives and negatives. I've noticed there's a big trend right now with using negatives, i.e the piece of card/paper a shape or word has been cut from instead of, (or as well as) the positive part that's been cut out.
I've got some example projects to show different ways I've used them.

Here with the card in the foreground I've used a die to cut out the shape from a piece of cardstock and used a scrap of paper to go behind the negative space to create an aperture. With the card in the background I've used the positive diecut shapes, (along with the Jenni Bowlin button stickers) and then also created an aperture in the centre of the card. If you're making negative spaces you want to line up with a background or foreground element a simple way to make sure you get your cut in the right place is to use a little bit of tape to hold the die in place. The washi tape from the kit came in really handy here!

With this layout I've also mixed up using positive and negative spaces. I'm going to add some handwritten journalling to the bottom right corner of this layout too.

For starters I used lots of off cut paper pieces to build the background of the layout up.

Then I've cut out circles from the Kesi'Art paper, it's the reverse side of the chalkboard one with the pie chart I love the pattern areas of it so I cut out some of those to use.

I cut some more circles from a piece of the woodgrain paper from the Lite kit but I also kept the negative piece to use as a window/aperture piece for the background of the layout too.

There's other negative spaces you can experiment with on a layout. I also filled in the negative spaces on the alphabet stickers by sticking them to patterned paper and cutting around them.

So have a go and see what you can come up with playing around with the positive and negative spaces on your projects.

Have fun!