 You're probably already familiar with the concept that positive and negative charges attract while like charges repel. This attraction or repulsion has been observed to act over a distance with no contact between individual elements. Fields describe non-contact forces, so we can use a field to describe the interactions between charged particles. In short, charged particles create electric fields. Let's look at the electric field surrounding a positive charge. Electric fields point in the direction that positive particles experience a force. A positive particle would be repelled from this positive charge. So we know the direction that the electric field will point away from the positive charge. Imagine that there is a positive particle right on top of the charge. They would hate being next to each other, so they would repel quite strongly. Now imagine that there is a positive particle at the other end of the universe. The repulsion these two particles will experience is very small. Since the repulsion is due to the electric field and the repulsion gets smaller the further away you are, then the strength of the electric field also gets smaller the further away you are. So this is the electric field surrounding a positive charge represented with vectors. We can also use field lines to represent the electric field. The vectors closer to the charge are bigger in magnitude, meaning that the electric field closer to the charge is stronger. So field lines should be more dense closer to the charge and less dense further out. So this is the electric field surrounding a positive charge represented with field lines. A negatively charged particle will have an electric field with the exact same shape as a positive particle. However, the field lines will point in the opposite direction. This is because electric field lines point in the direction that a positive particle will travel. So for a negative particle the field lines will point towards the particle.