Nighttime Drawing

The funny, and incredibly obvious, thing about nighttime drawing was my reliance on lights beyond my control. It was cold outside, and I live in an attic, so I started off my homework with this crazy good(I thought) idea to set myself up in front of my open window to look out over suburbia. This way I could do the outside drawing without having to go too far outside, and I could still keep my headphones plugged into my laptop from inside the building. It sounds like an alright way to handle things, but I quickly realized when I was doing my preliminary drawings that, surprise surprise, people who don't know you're drawing their houses turn their lights on and off. I guess someone with a very bright porch light decided they were going to bed at some point, because I was looking out and suddenly it got incredibly dark within a matter of seconds.
Fortunately, I hadn't yet put conte to paper, but losing that single prominent light did kind of screw things up for me. I guess I could have gone outside, but I chose to keep looking over a patch of houses that still had all of their lights coming through the windows.

Ben Folds - Landed

I'm hoping this video will show up since my first two can't seem to decide when/if they're available.
Either way, I picked another music video that I liked. This one is actually shot in black and white, so the contrast is more obvious, especially in the close ups of Ben Folds's face while he's singing and the light is really high. There's some positive/negative shapes in here too, with the opening and closing doors(and the silhouettes in them) in black and white.

The Dresden Dolls - Sing

Another music video(and one of my favorites) that's in color but has some really nice moments of contrast. There are some awesome shots with the living statues in white against the black curtains in the back, as well as the band against those same black curtains, and just the way the lighting is done in general.

Fidelity by Regina Spektor

Here is the first video I found to demonstrate positive/negative space and high contrast. It may not be the best example, but I thought of it immediately because, although it's filmed in color, everything in the video besides the singer is in black and white, which makes for some interesting positive/negative space in the sets and the props.
Embedding was disabled for this video, so I guess I'm doing this single blog entry as a series of three.

Noma Bar

    So I was searching around for artists with a strong sense of positive and negative space in their work, and I came across this pretty cool guy named Noma Bar. His images are very graphic design-y and (I think) cleverly done. He's also not bad with color contrast; his pieces kind of have a pop-up book or a poster feel,  to me. Here are a few of them: