The elements of art and the principles of design

the sheet’s front a flipped piece, showing the back the ground

• Line

  A line is a mark longer than it is wide, the path of a point in motion. Lines can be actual, drawn or cut, or implied, where the eye joins separate edges, points or gaps into a path that is not there.

  In a notan: Nothing in a notan is drawn, so every line is an edge: the place where one value stops and another begins. Each cut makes its line twice, once as the rim of the hole and once, mirrored, as the rim of the piece, so a line that leans one way inside the sheet leans the other way beyond it. A shape can be so thin that it reads as a line: a slit is a line of ground cut into the paper, and a strip left standing between two holes is a line of paper. And lines can be implied, as when a row of small holes reads as one dotted path.

  Activity: Lines That Cut Twice →

• Shape

  A shape is a flat, enclosed area with height and width but no depth. Shapes may be geometric, regular and measurable like circles and squares, or organic, irregular like leaves and clouds, and they may be positive, the subjects, or negative, the spaces around them.

  In a notan: In a notan every cut makes the same shape twice. Inside the sheet it is a negative shape, a hole that shows the ground; beyond the edge it is a positive shape, a piece that shows the back of the paper. The two are exact mirror images, so a circle or a square lands looking just as it did, while a leaf or a bird lands as its mirror twin, facing the other way. The sheet is a shape too. It begins as a plain rectangle, and every cut makes it more particular, until the paper left standing is often the most interesting shape in the design.

  Activity: Geometric and Organic Twins →

• Form

  Form is a three-dimensional element with height, width and depth, such as a cube, a sphere or a cylinder. On a flat surface form can only be implied, most often by light and shadow, overlap and perspective.

  In a notan: A notan is as flat as art gets: two values, no gradual shading, one plane. That makes it a good place to learn how form is implied. With no gradient to lean on, you must decide where the lit side of a solid ends and its shadow side begins, and make that boundary a cut. The fold helps. A cut that touches the edge of the sheet lands beside its hole as a mirror image, and the pair read as one solid lit from one side: a disc becomes a half-lit ball, a four-sided face and its twin the two sides of a box. Set the sheet to a half-tone, and it becomes the gray wall against which light and shadow both read.

  Activity: Light Side, Shadow Side →

• Space

  Space is the area around, between and within the parts of an artwork. Positive space is the area the subject occupies and negative space is the area around it; on a flat surface, artists also create an illusion of depth.

  In a notan: A notan has three spaces, not two: the sheet, the holes cut in it, and the ground all around. The holes are negative space inside the sheet, yet the same areas reappear outside it as positive pieces, so negative and positive are never fixed; they trade places at every edge. The ground between two pieces, or between a piece and the sheet, can harden into a shape of its own, and a good notan makes those in-between spaces as deliberate as the cuts. The flip also claims new space. Every fold sends paper out beyond the edge, so the design grows into the ground around it, and the margin you leave becomes part of the composition.

  Activity: Space That Changes Sides →

• Value

  Value is the lightness or darkness of a color or surface. It runs on a scale from white through the grays to black, and it is what lets the eye read form, light and distance.

  In a notan: A notan is value pared down to its fewest steps: the word joins the Japanese nō, dark, and tan, light. In cut paper the sheet gives one value, the ground seen through every hole and around the sheet gives the other, and each flipped piece shows the paper’s back. On a new design in the studio the front and back are both black and the ground is white, so the design has two values. Give the back a gray of its own and every piece becomes a third value: the three-value notan Arthur Wesley Dow taught. Either way, each area must be assigned to the dark or the light, as a painter decides by squinting.

  Activity: Two Values, Then Three →

• Color

  Color is the element produced when light reflected from a surface reaches the eye. It has three properties: hue, its name on the color wheel; value, how light or dark it is; and intensity, how pure or dull it is.

  In a notan: A notan in the studio has exactly three colors, one for each thing paper can do. The Front is the face of the sheet. The Back is its reverse, seen wherever a piece has been flipped. The Ground is everything that is not paper: the holes, and the space around the sheet. Recolor them and not one cut moves, yet the design can change completely. The shapes of a notan are held apart by value, and hue and intensity ride on top. A palette that keeps the three roles apart in value keeps the design legible whatever the hues; a palette that sets two roles at the same value can make a cut disappear, however bright the colors.

  Activity: One Design, Four Palettes →

• 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.

  Activity: Texture from Small Cuts →

• Balance

  Balance is the arrangement of visual weight in a work so that it feels stable. It may be symmetrical, with matching halves; asymmetrical, with unlike parts of equal weight; or radial, arranged around a center.

  In a notan: Every cut in a notan moves weight. The hole takes paper out of the sheet, and the piece lays the same shape down outside it, beyond the edge it folded over. So a notan’s balance is never settled inside the sheet: pieces folded only to the right make the whole design lean right, however centered the holes are. Each flip is itself a perfect symmetry, a hole and its mirror image across one edge. Those small symmetries can be arranged into a larger one, with matching cuts on opposite edges; into radial balance, with cuts on all four edges turning around the center; or into asymmetrical balance, where one large piece on one side is answered by several smaller ones on the other.

  Activity: Balancing the Flip →

• 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.

  Activity: Four Kinds of Opposite →

• Emphasis

  Emphasis is the principle of making one part of a work stand out so that the viewer looks there first. That part, the focal point, is set apart by contrast, isolation or placement, or by breaking a pattern the rest of the work sets up.

  In a notan: In a notan every cut is already loud, because each one sets dark against light twice. Emphasis therefore comes from the exception. Let most of the cuts follow a rule, the same size, the same shape, the same fold edge, and let one cut break it: the eye goes straight to the one piece that folds the other way. Notan adds a catch of its own. Every focal cut is a pair, a hole and a piece, and the two can compete, so part of the craft is deciding which of them is the true focal point. And because every piece shares the one Back color, you cannot simply paint one piece brighter: emphasis has to be built from shape, size, direction and placement.

  Activity: The Cut That Breaks the Rule →

• 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.

  Activity: A Path for the Eye →

• Pattern

  Pattern is the repetition of a motif, such as a shape, line or color, in a planned and regular arrangement across a surface. A motif can repeat by sliding, turning, mirroring, or mirroring and sliding at once.

  In a notan: A notan is patterned from the first cut: every shape repeats once, as its mirrored piece, in the opposite value. Repeat the cut and the pattern doubles. A row of holes along an edge makes a row of pieces beyond it, the second row a mirror of the first and reversed in value, so a border in the sheet becomes a border on the ground. The four ways a motif can repeat across a flat surface, sliding (translation), turning (rotation), mirroring (reflection) and mirroring while sliding (glide reflection), are all in the studio’s Transform and Copies. The fold is one more reflection laid over whatever you build: any pattern that folds out across an edge is repeated again, mirrored, on the other side.

  Activity: One Motif, Four Moves →

• Rhythm

  Rhythm is a principle of design created by repeating elements at planned intervals, so the eye moves through a work with a sense of beat. Rhythm can be regular, alternating, progressive or flowing.

  In a notan: In a notan, every cut sounds twice: once as a hole in the sheet and once as the mirrored piece folded out over an edge. Set cuts along one edge and the edge becomes a bar line, with holes on one side and pieces on the other: hole, piece, hole, piece. Keep the shape and the gap the same and the beat is regular. Swap between two shapes or two orientations and it alternates. Let each cut grow, shrink or turn by a steady step and the rhythm is progressive. Let sizes and gaps swell and ease like water and it flows. Because pieces show the back color and holes show the ground, a notan can even play its rhythm in three values, like three notes.

  Activity: Four Beats Along an Edge →

• Proportion and scale

  Proportion is the size relationship of the parts of a work to one another and to the whole. Scale is the size of a thing compared with something else, such as the human body or its surroundings.

  In a notan: In a notan the whole is the sheet, and every cut is measured against it. A small cut reads as a figure on a field of paper. As a cut grows the balance tips: the ground seen through the hole becomes a field of its own, and the band of paper left around it becomes the figure. The flip adds a second measure, because each piece is exactly the size of its hole and lies outside the sheet. A cut that reaches a third of the way in from one side, folded out over that side, makes the finished design a third wider than the paper it came from. The sheet’s own proportion, square, golden or root two, sets the terms for every cut that follows.

  Activity: The Measure of the Sheet →

• Unity and harmony

  Unity is the sense that all the parts of a work belong together as one whole. Harmony is the agreement among parts that share qualities such as shape, color, size or direction.

  In a notan: A notan starts with more unity than most designs. Everything comes from one sheet, every piece is the mirror of its hole, and there are only two values, or three when the back of the paper differs from its front. What breaks that unity is a vocabulary that sprawls: shapes from unrelated families, angles at every tilt, colors chosen one at a time. Harmony comes from agreement. Cuts drawn from one family of shapes, turned only to a short list of angles, lined up on shared lines and colored in one harmony read as a family, and the flip doubles every agreement, because each piece repeats its hole’s shape in the back color.

  Activity: A Family of Cuts →

• Variety

  Variety is the use of differences, such as changes in size, shape, direction, color or value, to create visual interest. It works with unity: too little variety is monotonous, and too much is chaotic.

  In a notan: Variety in a notan is difference with a family resemblance. Because every piece repeats its hole, a notan has sameness built in; variety comes from what the designer chooses to change: the size of one cut against another, its angle, its outline, the spacing, and which edge each piece folds over. The colors add one more lever, since pieces show the back and holes show the ground. The discipline is to change one quality at a time and keep the rest, so every difference reads as a decision. Change everything at once and the mirror logic that makes a notan legible is lost in noise.

  Activity: Difference by Degrees →