Texture from Small Cuts

The idea: texture

Texture is the way a surface feels, or looks as though it would feel. Actual texture can be touched; visual texture is suggested on a flat surface by marks, patterns and repeated shapes.

In a notan: A finished notan is flat: two or three colors, each perfectly even. Texture has to be built, and a notan builds it the way a woodcut or a stencil does, from many small, repeated shapes. A row of tiny cuts along an edge becomes a fringe; a scatter of small holes becomes a speckled surface. Because every hole is mirrored by its piece, the texture appears twice, once as holes in the sheet and once as pieces beyond its edge. Real paper adds a physical texture of its own: the tooth of the sheet, a clean or ragged edge, the thin shadow under a piece that does not lie flat. The studio shows that shadow only while a piece is folding; its finished artwork is flat, so any texture there is texture you cut.

Texture reaches us through two senses. Run a finger over bark and you feel it; look at a good drawing of bark and you believe you could. The first is actual, or physical, texture. The second is visual texture: an arrangement of marks that the eye reads as a surface. Artists in flat media, from woodcut to comics to screen design, make it the same way: they repeat small marks until the marks stop being separate things and become a surface.

A notan is a severe test of that idea, because it allows no shading and no brushwork. Every texture must be cut, and every cut has a piece, which gives notan texture a double life: a sawtooth cut along the top edge makes a fringe of notches in the sheet and a mirrored fringe of teeth above it. Make the cuts smaller and closer and something else happens: the eye stops seeing teeth and starts seeing a gray. Finding the point where texture turns into tone is the heart of this activity.

Art history

Each work below makes texture from repeated marks: a woodcut, a cut stencil, pencil rubbings and a painting of printed dots. Look at the scale of the marks: large, they read one by one; small and many, they merge into a surface.

• Albrecht Dürer Rhinoceros, 1515

  A woodcut prints only black or nothing. Dürer never saw the animal: he worked from a written description and a sketch sent from Lisbon, and invented its hide from repeated marks, with overlapping plates, rows of rivet-like dots and scales on the legs. The texture was so convincing that the print was taken as an accurate picture of a rhinoceros into the 1700s.

• Anonymous Japanese stencil carver Katagami Textile Stencil with Fawn Spot (Kanoko) and Bush Clover Design, 1800s–early 1900s Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts

  Katagami are dyers’ stencils cut from layers of mulberry paper stiffened with persimmon juice. This one fills its ground with small cut spots imitating kanoko, a tie-dye in which each tiny bound dot leaves a raised pucker in the silk. The stencil turns a texture you can touch into a flat one you can only see, which is exactly what a notan asks of you.

• Max Ernst Histoire naturelle (Natural History), c. 1925–26

  In 1925 Ernst laid paper on an old floor whose grain had been deepened by years of scrubbing and rubbed it with a soft pencil. From rubbings of wood, leaves and other surfaces he composed the imaginary landscapes and creatures of this portfolio of 34 collotypes. Frottage records a real surface as pure visual texture: your warm-up, made into art.

• Roy Lichtenstein Drowning Girl, 1963 The Museum of Modern Art, New York

  Lichtenstein cropped and enlarged a panel from a romance comic and painted the girl’s skin as a field of evenly spaced dots, copying the Ben-Day tints that cheap comic printing used for flesh. Up close the dots are plainly dots; from across a room they fuse into a smooth tone. It is texture becoming tone, painted large.

Design today

Printing has always turned texture and tone into dots. A halftone screen breaks a photograph into dots of different sizes; at arm’s length they merge into grays, and under a magnifier they separate again. Newspapers traditionally used coarse screens of about 85 lines per inch and magazines finer ones of 133 to 150, because smooth coated paper holds smaller dots. Comic printers added flat tints with Ben-Day dots, evenly spaced dots named after the illustrator and printer Benjamin Henry Day Jr., and designers still use halftone and grain as deliberate textures in posters and packaging.

Physical texture matters most where people touch a design. Packaging designers choose uncoated or textured paper, embossing and debossing (raised and pressed-in areas) and soft-touch coatings so that a box feels right in the hand. On screens, designers either imitate texture or leave it out: Apple’s iOS 7, released in 2013, dropped most of the imitation leather, felt and linen of earlier versions for flat color, and much of the industry followed. Both choices ask the question this activity asks: is the texture carrying meaning, or only noise?

Warm-up

Rub it, then fake it, ten minutes. Lay thin paper over three surfaces, such as a leaf, a coin and the sole of a shoe, and rub with the side of a crayon: that is actual texture, recorded. Beside each rubbing, invent the same texture with a black marker in solid marks only: dots, dashes, triangles, crescents. Which texture was easiest to translate into flat marks? Which one vanished?

In the studio

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

1. Open the studio. With the Triangle tool, drag out a small triangle, about an eighth of an inch tall, near the left end of the top edge, and fold it up with the ↑ arrow. With Move, turn it 60° (four Shift-steps of 15°) so it stands on its point, then press the Align button for top edges: a single selected shape aligns to the sheet, so its base now sits exactly on the top edge. You have one notch and one tooth.
2. Keep the tooth selected and open Transform. Set Move Horizontal to a little more than the tooth’s width (try 0.15 in), set Copies to 20, and watch the preview: a row of outlines, with dashed ones where the pieces will land. Press Apply. Every copy keeps the fold edge of the original, so you now have a sawtooth: a fringe of notches in the sheet and a fringe of teeth above it.
3. Press Undo, enter the same move and copies again, and turn on Random. Each copy now takes a random share of the move, so the spacing turns irregular and the saw starts to look like grass. Turn Random off and on for a fresh draw; the preview shows exactly what Apply will make. Keep the row you prefer.
4. Now build a field. Draw a small circle with the Ellipse tool near the right edge (press Shift once the drag has begun to make it round) and fold it right. Copy it into a short column with Copies and a vertical move, then select the whole column and copy it sideways, away from the edge. Every hole sends its piece out over the right edge, so the field appears twice: as holes in the sheet and as pieces beyond it.
5. Zoom out until the dots stop being dots. Then select the field, set Scale to 50% in Transform and press Apply. The reference point belongs to the whole selection, so the dots and the spaces between them shrink together. Find the size at which the field reads as a gray, somewhere between the sheet and the ground. That is how a halftone works.
6. Texture from a photo. Choose Trace a photo… from the File menu, load one of your textured surfaces and set Preview to Two-tone. Raise Blur a step at a time and watch the texture melt into smooth shapes. Set Blur back to 0 and lower Detail instead: small specks drop out while the edges of the large shapes stay sharp. Keep the texture you want, lose the noise you do not, and trace it.

With paper and paint: Painted Texture, Cut Texture

A brush, a sponge or a comb leaves texture whether you mean it to or not: the paint records how it was put down, as Ernst’s rubbings recorded a scrubbed floor. A cut texture is the opposite. Every mark is a decision, and every hole weakens the sheet, so real paper sets a limit on how small and how close cuts can go that the studio never does. By hand you also meet actual texture: a dry brush skips across the tooth of watercolor paper, a comb leaves ridges you can feel, and each glued piece casts a thin shadow. Making both kinds side by side shows which textures survive the flatness of a notan and which live only in paint.

1. Cover the table, put on the apron and squeeze a little black paint onto a plate. Make five textures on five cards, one to a card, edge to edge. Dry brush: load the stiff brush, wipe most of the paint off on a paper towel, and drag it lightly across the card so the bristles skip over the tooth. Sponge: dab a damp sponge in the paint and press it straight down and lift it straight up, again and again. Stipple: tap the tip of a stiff brush straight down in many small dots.
2. Spatter: thin a little paint with water, dip the toothbrush, hold it bristles down a few inches above the fourth card and draw the craft stick across the bristles toward you, so the spray flies away from you onto the paper. Comb: brush an even layer over the last card, thick if it is acrylic but thinner if it is tempera, which cracks where it dries thick, and, while it is wet, drag the comb or notched cardboard through it in straight lines or waves. Move all five cards onto wax paper and let them dry flat, so that paint at their edges cannot glue them to the newspaper.
3. While they dry, build texture by cutting. Along one edge of the black square, cut a row of small V-shaped notches with scissors. Near another edge, punch a field of small holes, or cut tiny triangles with the craft knife. Keep every piece that falls out.
4. Before you glue, use the holes as a stencil, as a katagami guides the dyer. Lay the punched square on white scrap paper and dab paint through the holes with a nearly dry sponge, then lift it straight off: the holes print as a field of dots. When the square is dry, glue it to the white card and, with tweezers, flip each little triangle and dot over its edge into its mirrored place.
5. Compare from a distance. Prop the five painted cards, the stenciled dots and the cut texture side by side, and look at them from across the room, then up close. Which textures melt into a gray first? Which keep their character? Is the painted field of dots or the cut one easier to read?
6. Rake the light. Hold the lamp low to one side and let its light skim every card. Look for actual texture: ridges where the comb pushed paint aside, the tooth showing through the dry brush, the lifted edge of each glued piece and its thin shadow. The studio shows that shadow only while a piece folds; press Replay to compare.
7. A notan from a painted texture. Choose your favorite dry card and cut three or four shapes from its edges. Glue the card to the black sheet, then flip each piece over its edge and glue it in its mirrored place. The pieces show the card’s plain white back, so every flip turns the texture off: smooth shapes against a textured sheet, the textured and the calm in one design.

Take care: Acrylic is permanent once dry, so wear an apron, spatter away from faces, and wash brushes, comb and sponge in soapy water before the paint dries on them. Cut on a mat with the blade moving away from your body, have an adult supervise knife work, use non-toxic paints with the ACMI AP seal, and let every card dry fully before you cut it.

Take it further

Look at Japanese katagami: some stencils for small repeating patterns pack as many as a hundred tiny carved holes into a single square centimeter. Try a paper version with a fine punch, or combine a traced surface with hand-built texture from Copies in one design. Then remove one texture: did the design lose meaning, or only noise?

Reflect

• Which of your textures did viewers name correctly, and which did they misread?
• At what size and spacing did your dots stop being dots and start being a gray?
• What does cut paper give you that the studio’s flat artwork does not, and what does the studio give you that paper does not?
• The katagami copies a tie-dye and Lichtenstein copies a printing process. What surface could your cuts copy?

What to look for

• At least one textured area is built from a dozen or more repeated cuts.
• The learner can point to an actual texture and a visual texture, in the painted cards and in the cut paper, and say which is which.
• Textured areas are set against smooth, uncut areas.
• At least one field reads as a gray from a distance and as separate marks up close.
• Blur or Detail settings for the trace were chosen on purpose and can be explained.