Why do some paintings win first place in an art competitions? The answer often lies in the harmonious arrangement of black and white in the painting. The arrangement of dark and light creates an impression of beauty, regardless of either the colors used or of the subject matter. This is called "notan" from the Japanese word that means "dark/light harmony".

Nothing else will contribute more to the success of your final painting than planning the notan correctly. Just about every painting that I have had win a competition, or got published in a book has had a very strong notan structure.

Here are some notan sketches for two award winning paintings.

A strong notan design is therefore the key to a strong painting. Without it, both color and line fail to reach their full impact. In fact many of the most powerful master paintings have very simple value structures, that is to say, they only use two, three, or four major values. For example, many of Monet’s masterpieces use just two values. The idea is simple, but effective notan paintings are hard to do. It requires an understanding of dominant values and how to flatten values into a narrow value range. It is also very easy to waste time on excessive detail, and at the same time miss the essence of the notan design.

This course will get your started with this critical topic. This is one of the most important topics for beginners (and for advanced students too!).

In this course you will learn:

• exactly what is notan and why it is so important
• the five main types of notan painting
• a simple three-step process for creating notan paintings using brush pens
• what materials to use to give you the best results
• nine tips to help you do better notans
• the seven most common problems that beginners make when doing notan studies

Total number of assignments: 4

Total number of pages: 15