A Path for the Eye

The idea: movement

Movement is the principle that guides the viewer’s eye through a work along a planned path, and that suggests motion in a still image. Artists create it with lines, edges, diagonals, shapes that point, and repeated shapes that change step by step.

In a notan: A notan is still, but it records a motion. Every piece has traveled: it was folded out over an edge from its hole, and the eye retraces that journey each time it links a piece to the shape it left behind. A sequence of cuts that changes a little at each step, growing, turning or stepping along, carries the eye from one to the next, while diagonals and pointed shapes set a direction. The fold adds a rule of its own. A piece reverses the part of a cut’s direction that crosses the edge and keeps the part that runs along it. So a line of cuts climbing toward the right edge becomes, beyond it, a line coming back down: a chevron, with the edge at its peak.

Movement in a still picture means two things. One is the path the eye travels: where it enters, what it follows, where it leaves. The other is implied motion: the sense that something is falling, flying or rushing past. Artists make both with the same means. A diagonal feels less settled than an upright or a level line. A shape with a point seems to be heading somewhere. A row of shapes that changes a little at each step, a little larger, a little further turned, reads as one thing in motion, the way the frames of a film do.

A notan adds a third movement: the flip itself. Each piece really did travel, from its hole over an edge, and Studio Notan can show that journey again with Replay. In this activity you plan a path, build it from a stepped sequence of cuts, work out how the fold bends it, and use Replay to check that the order of the flips supports the route you meant. Then you cut the route in paper over grounds painted with directional brushstrokes, and test whether the strokes carry the eye along it or pull it away.

Art history

Artists were putting motion into still pictures long before film. Japanese printmakers used wind, rain and diagonals. In the late 1870s photographers froze motion into sequences; the Italian Futurists, who celebrated speed, borrowed those sequences for painting; and in the 1960s Op artists made still surfaces seem to move by themselves.

• Katsushika Hokusai Ejiri in Suruga Province, from Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, c. 1830–32

  A gust tears sheets of paper from a traveler’s pack and scatters them across the sky. The loose trail of papers rises on a diagonal from the struggling figures at the lower left toward the upper right, away from the still outline of Mount Fuji. It is a path made of small light pieces, exactly what a row of flipped cuts can be.

• Eadweard Muybridge The Horse in Motion, 1878

  Muybridge photographed the horse Sallie Gardner at a gallop with a row of cameras, and the frames were published as cards of small dark silhouettes against a light, ruled backdrop. Read in order, the silhouettes become one horse running. Each frame changes only a little from the last, which is the secret of every sequence that moves.

• Giacomo Balla Swifts: Paths of Movement + Dynamic Sequences, 1913 Museum of Modern Art, New York

  Balla painted the flight of swifts as overlapping repeats of the same dark wing shapes strung along curving paths, drawing on Étienne-Jules Marey’s photographs of birds in flight. The repeated wings are the sequence, and the curves that join them are the path.

• Bridget Riley Movement in Squares, 1961 Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London

  A black-and-white checkerboard in which the squares keep their height but narrow toward a band near the middle, so the surface seems to fold away and back. There are only two values and one shape; the movement comes entirely from a steady change in width. It is a notan in all but name, and proof that a sequence can move without a single diagonal.

Design today

Designers plan reading order as carefully as any printmaker. Eye-tracking research by the Nielsen Norman Group, first published in 2006, found that people often scan text-heavy web pages in an F shape, across the top and then down the left side, so layouts put the most important things on that path. Posters lead the eye on purpose instead: a diagonal headline, a figure that looks or points toward the text, a sequence of shapes that grows toward the one thing you must read.

In motion design the same ideas are timed. Animators still work from the twelve principles set out by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston in The Illusion of Life (1981), among them slow in and slow out, the easing that lets a movement start gently and settle gently, and arcs, the curved paths that natural motion follows. Interface designers stagger a list so its items arrive one after another and lead the eye down the screen. The flip in Studio Notan eases in and out, and Replay plays the cuts at a steady interval, so a notan played back is a small piece of motion design.

Warm-up

Trace a path. Lay tracing paper or a clear sheet over a printed copy of Hokusai’s Ejiri in Suruga Province or Riley’s Movement in Squares. Draw one continuous line that follows where your eye goes in the first ten seconds. Compare lines with a partner. Where do they agree? Mark where each line enters the picture and where it leaves.

In the studio

Make it in Studio Notan, where every cut can be moved, refolded and undone.

1. Plan the route. On scrap paper, draw the sheet as a rectangle and sketch the path you want: where the eye enters, where it turns, and which edge it crosses. Keep it simple, one sweep or one bend. A diagonal route will feel more active than a level one.
2. Make the first step. In the studio, choose Triangle and draw a small triangle where your route begins, and fold it over the edge your route is heading toward. A triangle is a good traveler, because its point says which way it is going. Switch to Move, drag the handle on its top side up to make it taller, so one point clearly leads, then turn it, holding Shift for 15° steps, until that point aims along your route.
3. Build the sequence. With the triangle selected, open ‘Transform’ on the Controls tab (see Transform). Set a Move ‘Horizontal’ and ‘Vertical’ that steps along your route; down is positive, so a route that climbs needs a negative vertical move. Add an ‘Angle’ of 10 to 20 degrees if the route bends, and a ‘Scale’ of 110 percent if the shapes should grow as they go. Set ‘Copies’ to 5 and adjust until the cyan preview follows your sketch, then press ‘Apply’. A move with a turn bends the row into an arc, and a scale opens the arc into a spiral (see Copies).
4. Read the fold. Every copy folds over the same edge as the first, and every piece mirrors its hole. If your sequence climbs toward the right edge, the pieces beyond it come back down, and the whole path makes a chevron with the edge at its peak. If the sequence runs along an edge rather than toward it, the pieces keep its direction and march alongside. Try both: select the whole sequence, click the arrow on another side of its box, and watch the path change.
5. Play it back. Press the ▶ button beside the zoom control. Replay folds every cut again, oldest first, a new one starting every 0.78 seconds. Does the motion run along your route, or does it jump around the sheet?
6. Fix the order. Replay keeps the order in which cuts were first made, not where they sit now, so moving a cut does not change its turn. If a flip plays out of sequence, delete that cut and draw it again: it will now play last. Build the route in the order you want it read, and Replay becomes a small animation of your path.
7. Test it on a viewer. Show the finished notan, not the replay, to someone who has not seen it, and ask them to trace their eye’s path with a finger. Compare it with your sketch. If they get lost, look for the gap: two steps too far apart, a shape pointing the wrong way, or a cut elsewhere on the sheet that pulls harder than the route.

With paper and paint: Cut a route over painted strokes

A brushstroke is a record of motion. It starts where the loaded brush touched down and breaks into dry streaks where the paint ran out, so a painted surface keeps the direction of the hand that made it, much as a notan keeps the journey of every piece. A shape on screen has no such memory: its fill is the same in every direction. Painting two grounds that differ only in the direction of their strokes lets you test two kinds of movement against each other, the current of the paint and the path of the cuts. In Hokusai’s Ejiri, a trail of scattered papers rises on a diagonal across the sky; here you find out whether a painted current under such a trail helps the eye follow it or pulls it away. Folding each piece over the edge by hand also makes the chevron something you do, not something you watch, and a viewer’s finger shows exactly where the eye went and where it stumbled.

1. Mark the grounds. Cover the table and tape both sheets of watercolor paper down along all four edges, each turned so it is wider than it is tall. On each, lightly pencil a 6-inch square half an inch from the left end, for the black sheet, which leaves about five and a half inches of open ground to its right. Pencil your route lightly across the square: in at the lower left, climbing toward the right edge.
2. Paint strokes that follow the route. Load the wide brush with a thin wash, touch off the drips on the rim of the jar, and pull one stroke along the route in a single motion, up toward the right edge of the square and down again beyond it, where the pieces will fall. Do not go back over it. Fill the first ground with strokes running the same way, a little apart so they do not run together, each with a fresh load of paint. Each starts full and wet and breaks into dry streaks as the paint runs out, so every stroke shows which way it traveled.
3. Paint strokes that cross it. On the second ground, with the same brush and wash, pull every stroke straight up and down, across the route, spaced as before. The two grounds now differ in one thing only: the direction of the paint.
4. Cut the route while they dry. Cut a 6-inch square of black construction paper. Copy your route onto it in white pencil and draw five triangles along it, each a little larger than the last and each with one long point aimed along the route. Keep every cut closer to the right edge than the open ground is wide, so every piece will land on the ground. Cut them out, using the knife against the metal ruler for straight sides, or with scissors after an adult has started each cut with a short slit on its line, and keep the pieces in order.
5. Fold the pieces over the edge. When the first ground is dry and flat, lay the black sheet in its square. Turn each piece over, like the page of a book, out across the right edge, and set it as far beyond the edge as its hole sits inside it. The holes climb toward the edge and the pieces come back down beyond it: the chevron from the studio, now made by hand. Notice which way the folded pieces point.
6. Trace it with a finger. Ask someone who has not seen your plan to trace with a finger the path their eye takes, and watch where the finger hesitates or strays. Then lay the sheet and its pieces in the same places on the second ground and ask a new viewer to trace again. Does the path run more easily over strokes that follow it, or do the crossing strokes stop the eye at each cut?
7. Choose and glue. Decide which ground carries the route, and glue the sheet and its pieces to it with the glue stick on the side that faces the ground. Then set it beside your studio design. Which carries the eye farther, the flat screen or the painted current?

Take care: Cut on a self-healing mat with the blade moving away from your body and your other hand behind it, and let an adult handle the knife for young learners. Use paints and inks labeled non-toxic (look for the ACMI AP seal), cover the table, let the grounds dry fully before laying paper on them, and rinse the brush straight away, since dried india ink stains cloth for good and ruins a brush.

Take it further

Make a sequence that moves like Muybridge’s horse. Cut a simple silhouette, a bird or a running figure, then pull away four copies across the sheet by Option-dragging with Move, and change each copy’s pose a little with Points. Replay turns the row into a short animation. Then try Riley’s approach, movement with no diagonal at all: a row of rectangles made with Copies, with the chain link turned off and a horizontal ‘Scale’ below 100 percent, so that each keeps its height and is a little narrower than the last.

Reflect

• Where did viewers’ eyes enter your notan, and did the painted strokes carry them along your path or pull them away?
• How did the fold change the direction of your path, and did that help your route or fight it?
• What did Replay show you about your design that the finished sheet did not?
• Which work in this lesson moves most for you, and which of its devices could you use next?

What to look for

• The route has a clear entry, at least five steps that each change by a small, consistent amount, and a clear exit.
• The learner can explain which edge the route folds over and how the fold changed its direction.
• Replay plays the route’s cuts in reading order.
• The strokes on each painted ground run clearly one way, and the learner can say which ground carried the path and why.
• A viewer who has not seen the plan traces a path close to it.