In this unit you will learn how to use color notans to help plan the color harmony in your painting. These studies are very different from mass and contour notan paintings but are a powerful tool for exploring your design before you commit to paint. Since they take only a few minutes to do, they can make the difference between a poor and a very strong color harmony in your paintings. I use these color notans in some of my landscape paintings, particularly when color is the key component of the design. However I use them in nearly all of my figure work since it can save hours of wasted effort due to a earnly poor color selection. This is an important skill you need to know about.

Edge notan paintings give you a way of exploring the design of your paintings more thoroughly than simple two, three and four-value notan paintings. Once you have mastered the basic techniques. you can do them in an incredibly short time, yet they can give you a very good feeling for the final paintings. In fact these small design sketches can turn out to be beautiful paintings in their own right. Also they are fun to do!

Caution: You can only attempt to do this type of notan study once you have fully mastered the techniques and principles in units 1,2,3 and 4. If you have not mastered those units, you are likely to struggle doing these.

In this course you will learn:

• how to create a color notan and what materials to use
• how to use edge notans to explore fast and slow edges quickly and effectively
• how to avoid the two most common problems most people run into when they add edges to notan paintings
• an efficient four-step procedure for using brush pens to create edge notan paintings
• which old master paintings you can examine to explore the edge notan concept more
• how to use these small studies to enhance your creativity in design

Total number of assignments: 5

Total number of pages: 13