Notan art

Notan is a Japanese word for “light and dark”. We made Notan art using black and white paper and contrasting colored papers. Both of them turned out good.

Materials needed:

1. Construction papers

2. Scissors

3. Glue

4. Pencil

Method:

1. Take 2 papers in contrasting colors. For our first work, we took black and white. One of the papers should be less than half of the size of the other paper.

2. Draw some designs with pencil on the smaller paper along the sides.

3. Cut out the designs. Store all the cut out pieces.

4. Keep the cut out pieces back into the paper where they were cut from. Apply glue on the cut out pieces on the side facing up while they are still inside the cut out area.

5. Remove the pieces one at a time and flip over to paste on the white paper. The cut out pieces are pasted just across their corresponding negative spaces.

Notan art was fun and simple.

When I insisted my nine year old to try out a simple design, she drew only rectangles along the four sides, cut them out and pasted across the corresponding negative spaces. It looked beautiful too.