Not Notan Yet

 We began playing with notan in studio this week. Notan is a Japanese term meaning light & dark in harmony. We used a form where we cut shapes from a flat piece of paper and rearranged all the pieces on a paper of contrasting color to create patterns. 

Before studio I played with the form in Adobe Fresco. Functionally, it was easy to keep track of cut out pieces in Fresco...how they might flip and be placed to reflect the white space they vacated. 

For the first notan I produced in Fresco, I cut out shapes inspired by Henri Matisse. Thinking of his swimming pool, I produced a koi pond. Next I cut out shapes from a six sided polygon to create a radially symmetric pattern, or spiked rivet. For my last digital notan before studio, I considered how to produce landscape effects. 

These studies strike me as a fun way of deriving repeating motifs for fabrics or fashion trims. 

In studio, I found that my cutting skills are in need of practice. The trouble is I'm not making my first cut deep enough to separate the paper completely. Our instructor warned us it would be easy to make mistakes so I decided to improve to find some of those mistakes. Hot take, I'd say that it is very easy to make unnecessary cuts, almost as hard as it is to cut shapes cleanly.

For my improved notan in studio, I began with a central tree. As I began flipping shapes and examining what I might see, I particularly enjoyed the duck that emerged on the right and my friend Totoro who arrived on the left. A face suggests itself at the top of the tree but is not fully realized. 

This form of notan strikes me an excellent approach to minimizing material waste...but only if one plans ahead wisely.

Are light and dark in harmony? Ah, not yet...but what an interesting chord that sounded on first strike!