Some thoughts on drawing and negative space

I have always loved mark-making that is concise, when the artist is able to articulate the idea of an object with minimal noodling. To me this type of drawing is like a well-executed magician’s trick, a bit of sleight of hand – from far away the object resolves but up close you can pick apart the two or three well placed lines used to make the trick convincing.

I think the key to simplicity is being able to draw with the negative space, always keeping in mind what each line says about the space around it.

When I was in high school I struggled through some Lao Tzu and although I can't claim to have understood a lot of what he wrote there was one passage that I still think about all the time when I'm drawing because to me it's all about the usefulness of negative space:

Thirty spokes joined at one hub;
emptiness makes the cart useful.
Clay cast into a pot;
the emptiness inside makes it useful.
Doors and windows cut to make a room;
emptiness make the room useful.
Thus being is beneficial
but usefulness comes from the void.

Today I read Spent by Joe Matt. The most interesting part of the comic for me was when he was talking about the parts of his previous comics that he'd embellished for the sake of the story (like the ménage à trois with his ex). For some reason I've always taken autobio comics to be sacred - especially the ones that are particularly self loathing (I guess because at that point we really invest in the honesty, I mean if someone is writing about their piss jar one assumes at that point that all the laundrys been aired). But of course a story teller is going to alter and change things for the sake of a better story, it must be next to impossible for them not to! So how much of the rest of Spent is strictly fact?

On a side note, when you look up ménage à trois on Wikipedia you get this picture.