Notan 3/24/2014
Notan is a Japanese word meaning "Light-Dark." We were learning about the idea of POSITIVE space (the space an object occupies) and NEGATIVE space (the space around an object), and papercutting Notan is a medium that shows these concepts really well. Students had to draw out designs that made solid shapes, and did not cross lines. They then had to cut out each shape. Making sure they did not lose any shapes was tough for some of the students! They glued down the main square of paper that was left behind, and then matched up the cut out shapes. This made it easy to then flip out the shapes to glue down. The shapes that were drawn and then cut out became our POSITIVE space, and the resulting hole was NEGATIVE space. We used the idea of Notan (light-dark) to see how all the black paper could be considered POSITIVE space, or NEGATIVE space, depending how you look at it.