Great Drawing site!

http://www.sibleyfineart.com/index.htm?tipsndx.htm

This is the key to negative drawing; the technique that you must learn - as you work, focus your full attention not on the actual lines you are drawing but on the spaces in between them. In common with watercolour painting, the only white available to the Graphite Artist is the white of the paper. To produce a white line you must therefore define that line by outlining it in a darker tone. The line you are drawing has no importance in itself. It is the space between the lines that is paramount.

Are these black lines on white or white on black? If these are black lines drawn on white paper then the drawn lines are positive marks.		White lines on black? They appear to be so only because the black defines their boundaries. The black is drawn solely to create the white. This is negative drawing.

DASH & REHASH v SLOW 'N STEADY

I have two basic ways of working - both equally justifiable - "dash and rehash" and "slow 'n steady". The first often works well and it's the one I recommend for drawing grass - it contains an element of spontaneity and some surprising results can emerge. It's quick, it's immediate and requires only a little, if any, retouching (the "rehash" element). We'll come back to "Slow 'n Steady" later and then combine the two. Imagine that there are only two marks that we can make: one upwards and one down. I'm going to use the upwards stroke to "draw" the stalks that spring up from the base of a clump of grass. The downward stroke is going to taper off and define the tops of the stalks in the clump below the one I'm drawing. The upward stroke draws a positive mark, the downstroke draws in negative.

Working quickly, more strokes have been added...

...the area is expanded... (the box encloses the previous image)

...then I draw back down into the base to further define the white spaces.