One of the difficulties in any teaching of mathematics is to bridge the divide between the abstract and the intuitive. Throughout school one encounters increasingly abstract notions, which are more and more difficult to relate to everyday experiences. This article examines a familiar approach to thinking about negative numbers, that is an intuitive approach with the aid of the number line. This article also presents a less complicated approach that is by extension to the number compass. An analogy used to introduce complex numbers in more or less the same way is presented.