Notan

Yesterday I drove to Dunvegan for a meeting of the Artist Trading Cards group. We get together every last Saturday of the month to trade our original art cards with our peers. We can even trade with people who aren't there! Ronna brings in cards made by artists who send them to her by snail mail. We add our own card to the collection and then help ourselves to the one we like.

I made cards that had a haiku written on a piece of hand-painted paper. Each card had a layer of transparent embossed paper covering the haiku, making it even more Zen. My Haiku was:
In Dunvegan we
trade miniature artworks
one-for-one, for free.

This weekend was dedicated to doing what I love to do, so I sat down and made a series of ATCs for November. They are inspired by the concept of Notan, which I recently came across while Googling sacred sciences. Notan means "light/dark harmony" in Japanese. It is a concept that helps to design harmonious light and dark values in your painting. The idea is similiar to the Yin/Yang symbol: keeping light and dark in balance is the essence of harmony.

I invite you to try this out. Take a piece of 1" square white paper and cut out shapes. Use what is left of the square and all the pieces you cut out to make a design on a black or dark art card. The challenge is greater when you increase the size of your square to 2" ( like my cards # 5 and #6).