Four Kinds of Opposite

The idea: contrast

Contrast is the arrangement of opposites, such as light and dark, large and small, or geometric and organic, side by side in a work of art. It creates visual interest, separates one part from another, and gives a design its energy.

In a notan: Notan is contrast at its most elemental: two values and nothing in between. Every cut makes its contrast twice. The hole lets the light ground into the dark sheet, and the piece carries the dark sheet out onto the light ground, so each shape appears once as light in dark and once as dark in light. Because value contrast is already at its maximum, the other contrasts do the rest of the work: a large cut against small ones, a geometric cut against an organic one, an edge crowded with cuts against an edge left whole. The Back color adds a third value when you want one. Make it differ from the Front and the pieces can stand apart from the sheet, or step back from it.

A notan has only two values, so it is easy to think it has only one contrast. Look longer and you find at least four. Value is the light and dark of the ground and the paper. Size is a large cut beside small ones. Shape is a geometric cut, all straight sides and true curves, beside an organic one, drawn by hand and irregular. Density is a stretch of edge crowded with cuts beside a stretch left whole. Each is an opposition, and each gives the eye a reason to move from one place to another.

In this activity you isolate each contrast in turn, the way a scientist changes one variable at a time, and then combine them. The aim is a design that holds together from across the room, where only the strongest oppositions survive, and still rewards a close look. Then you take the same test to paper and paint, and add two contrasts of your own making: two hues mixed to the same value, and the texture of a brushstroke, which a screen cannot give you.

Art history

Artists have always known that dark and light are strongest side by side. Arthur Wesley Dow, whose book Composition (1899) brought the Japanese word notan into American art teaching, made the arrangement of dark and light one of three elements every design is built from, with line and color. The works below push contrast to its limit in different ways: one shape against an empty field, a crowded surface against a silent one, a vast dark against a small light, sharp against round.

• Kazimir Malevich Black Square, 1915 State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

  A black square painted on a white ground: value contrast with nothing else to distract from it. It is also the starting point of every notan, a dark sheet on a light ground before the first cut. Notice that the white border, as much as the black, decides how heavy the square feels.

• Aubrey Beardsley The Peacock Skirt, 1893 Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts

  A pen drawing for Oscar Wilde’s play Salome, published in 1894. Beardsley packs the peacock train with fine lines and feather eyes, then leaves wide areas of plain white and solid black. This is contrast of density: the quiet areas are what make the busy ones visible.

• Félix Vallotton Money (L’Argent), from the series Intimités, 1898

  Vallotton cut his woodblocks so that whole areas print as solid black. In Money, uncut black fills more than half the print, and a woman in a white dress stands close beside a man in dark evening clothes. The contrast is of mass: a vast dark against a small light, which makes the light feel exposed and important.

• El Lissitzky Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, 1919–20

  A poster from the Russian Civil War, printed in red and black. A sharp red wedge drives into a white circle, the ground is split into light and dark, and small shapes scatter at the edges. Every part is an opposition: sharp against round, dark field against light, large against small. Contrast of shape carries the message on its own.

Design today

Contrast is how designers make things legible. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) measure the contrast between text and its background as a ratio, and ask for at least 4.5 to 1 for body text and 3 to 1 for large text. Black on white is 21 to 1, the highest ratio possible, which is exactly where a new notan starts. Designers also build hierarchy with contrast of size and weight: a headline set far larger and heavier than its text tells a reader at a glance what comes first.

Logos are tested the way a notan is made. Brand guidelines commonly include a one-color version of a mark and a reversed version, light on dark, and a strong mark survives both. If a logo only works in full color, it depends on hue to tell its parts apart; if it works in one color and in reverse, its contrasts of shape and size are doing the work.

Warm-up

The squint test. Open the studio, or pin up any black-and-white image, and stand about ten feet back. Squint until the details blur, and list what still stands apart: that is where the strongest contrasts are. Then walk up close and list what appears that you could not see from far away. Keep both lists for judging your own work later.

In the studio

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

1. Open the studio. A new design starts with a black Front, a black Back and a white Ground, the three cards under ‘Colors’ on the Color tab (see Colors). That is the widest value contrast a screen can show, so leave it for now. Under ‘Flipping’ on the Controls tab, keep ‘Each shape’, so every cut asks for its direction as soon as you finish it.
2. Study one, value. With Rectangle, drag a tall rectangle near the right side of the sheet and choose the → arrow. Look at the pair: the same shape appears as white in black and as black in white. Save the study with ‘Save project’ in the File menu, then clear the sheet with ‘Reset’ and ‘Design’, which keeps your colors (see Reset). Do the same after each of the next studies.
3. Study two, size. With Ellipse, draw one large circle near the top edge, pressing Shift once the drag has begun to keep it round, and fold it up. Then draw four small circles near the bottom edge and fold them down. Make the large circle at least four times as wide as the small ones. Squint: which do you see first? Size contrast works like volume. The large shape speaks first, and the small ones answer.
4. Study three, shape. Cut two or three geometric shapes near the left edge with Triangle and Hexagon, and fold them left. Then choose Draw and draw one loose, irregular shape by hand near the right edge, a leaf, a puddle or a flame, and fold it right. Keep every shape roughly the same size, so shape is the only thing that differs. Notice how the organic cut looks grown and the geometric ones look built.
5. Study four, density. Cut six or seven small rectangles close together along one stretch of the bottom edge, each folding down. Leave the other three edges whole. The crowded edge buzzes and the empty edges rest, and neither would register without the other. For exact spacing, make one cut and repeat it with Copies.
6. Turn the value down. With study four still open, select the Ground card and type 777777 into its hex field, a middle gray, and press Enter. The holes turn gray, the pieces sit on gray, and the whole design goes quiet at once. Type ffffff to bring the white back. Size, shape and density were there all along, but value contrast is what made them easy to see.
7. Combine. Start a fresh sheet and make one design that uses all four contrasts: one dominant large cut, a family of small ones, at least one geometric and one organic shape, and a crowded edge against a quiet one. Then stand ten feet back and squint. If everything is equally loud, nothing is loud: make the large cut larger, or empty an edge.

With paper and paint: Three painted pairs

On screen, a hex code sets a color exactly and every surface is perfectly flat. Paint gives you neither. You mix each value by eye, and gouache even shifts a little as it dries, so matching two colors in value becomes a skill you can feel rather than a number you type. A brush also adds a contrast the studio cannot show at all: texture, the ridges of a stroke that catch the light. And a cut in painted paper cannot be undone, so each circle is a decision. Making the pairs by hand lets you test what the gray ground suggested in the studio, that value carries farther than any other contrast, instead of taking it on trust.

1. Cut and tape the cards. Cover the table. Cut each sheet of watercolor paper into a ground, 6 by 9 inches, and a smaller sheet, 4 by 5 inches, so you have three of each. Tape every card down along its edges with painter’s tape, which holds it flat while the paint dries. Each small sheet and its ground will become one small notan.
2. Paint a value pair. Darken some blue with a little black and paint the first small sheet with it. Lighten more of the same blue with plenty of white and paint the first ground. Brush on two thin, smooth coats, the second across the first, rather than one thick coat, which can crack as it dries. The hue is the same on both cards, so the only contrast is value.
3. Paint a hue pair at equal value. Lighten some blue with white, a little at a time, until it looks as light as your orange. It is easier to lighten the darker color than to darken the lighter one, since black dulls orange toward brown. Brush a swatch of each on scrap paper and let them dry, because gouache shifts a little as it dries, then photograph them side by side with the black-and-white filter. When both turn the same gray, paint the second small sheet orange and the second ground with the matched blue. They now differ only in hue.
4. Paint a texture pair. Mix enough middle gray, from black and white, for the last two cards. Paint the small sheet in two thin coats with the soft brush, crossing the first with the second, so that no strokes show. Paint the ground with the same gray, using the stiff brush and less water, and leave every stroke ridged and visible. Keep the ridges low, since thick paint can crack as it dries. Color and value now match, and only texture differs.
5. Let everything dry. Thin coats dry in minutes, but the brushy ground can take an hour, so if time is short, leave the cards taped down until the next session. Wait until every card is dry and no longer cool to the touch, then peel off the tape and trim the thin unpainted border from each card, so no white edge adds a contrast of its own. Damp paint smears, and damp paper tears rather than cuts.
6. Cut one circle from each sheet. Trace the coin about half an inch above the bottom edge of each small sheet, centered from side to side, in the same place on all three. Cut out each circle. With a craft knife, turn the card, not the knife, as you go around the curve. With scissors, have an adult start the cut with a short knife slit on the line, then snip around the line from there, so neither the hole nor the circle is nicked. Keep each circle with its sheet.
7. Assemble three small notans. Stand both cards of a pair upright and glue the small sheet onto its ground with the glue stick on its unpainted back, centered from side to side and half an inch below the top, so a wide band of ground is left below it. The hole now shows the ground. Lay the circle face up below the sheet, as far beyond its bottom edge as the hole sits inside it, and glue it down. A circle is its own mirror image, so this is exactly where a flip would put it, and its painted face stays on top. Each pair now makes its contrast twice, as every cut in a notan does.
8. Test from across the room. Pin the three notans up side by side, walk about ten feet back and squint. Which circles, hole and piece, can you still see, and which disappear first? Write down your ranking before you compare it with a partner’s. Often the value pair holds longest, the hue pair, which can seem to shimmer where the colors meet up close, melts into one tone, and the brushwork fades long before the edge of a shape does. The eye finds fine edges mainly through differences of light and dark, and much less through differences of hue.

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 labeled non-toxic (look for the ACMI AP seal), cover the table, let every card dry fully before cutting, and rinse brushes before the paint dries in them.

Take it further

Find contrast in a photograph. Open Trace a photo, load a picture with strong light and shade, separate it by brightness, and slide the Threshold while you watch the Two-tone preview. Every position of the slider is a different two-value reading of the same picture. Choose the one where the most important shape stands clear of everything around it, trace it and flip it. Then make the Back a mid gray, so the pieces contrast less than the holes, and ask what that third value does to the design.

Reflect

• Which of the four contrasts did viewers notice first from across the room, and why do you think it won?
• What disappeared first when the ground turned gray, or when you stepped back from the painted pairs, and what held on?
• Where in your design do a hole and its piece read most alike, and where do they read most differently?
• Which contrast from Malevich, Beardsley, Vallotton or Lissitzky would you borrow next, and what would it change?

What to look for

• Each of the four studies changes one kind of contrast and keeps the others roughly equal.
• The combined design has one clearly dominant cut, a family of smaller ones, and geometric and organic cuts that can be told apart at a glance.
• At least one edge is crowded with cuts and at least one is left whole.
• In the painted pairs, the two hues turn the same gray in a black-and-white photo, and the two textures match in color and value.
• The learner can point to a hole and its piece and describe the same shape in both values.