Virtual Art Academy® Notan Painting Lessons

Why does a certain painting win first place in an art competition? The answer lies a lot in the harmonious arrangement of black and white in the painting. A well organized arrangement of dark and light shapes 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". Just about every successful master painting has a very strong notan structure. Notan is such a powerful factor in the success of your painting that it is one of the first things you should study.

This course unit introduces you to the concept of notan and to the three main types of notan structures you can use in your painting: two, three and four value notans. In fact many of the greatest old master paintings use one of these three notan structures, that is to say, they only use two, three, or four major values. For example, many of Monet’s masterpieces are just two value notans.

In this course unit I go beyond the basics principles of what are notans and explain how to design them well. The basic concept I talk about in course unit one is fairly simple. However the secret is in how to make the notan structure of you painting beautiful. In this course unit I explain the three major design principles that will result in a beautiful notan structure in your painting. Nearly all beginner paintings (and a lot of the work I see in commercial galleries!) suffer from one of these three problems.

In contour notans you explore the beauty of line and and shape. Since this is a fairly time consuming process, learning how to differentiate between mass and contour notan paintings will greatly speed up the process of planning your painting. You might ask why it is important to speed up the process of painting? It is a good question, and the answer is that if you use an efficient process, you can explore more design options in less time. The chances are that the more different design options to explore before you start your painting, the better painting you will end up with. Plus it will give you a little more time to put your feet up and relax while you are painting!

A key planning stage in a painting that comes after the initial notan studies is the limited value study. Most artists do not understand the difference between this and a notan study, with the result that they waste a lot of time in the early creative stages of producing a painting. This type of study is essential if you are working on a large painting. With small paintings I don't do this type of study because the notan study is enough. A notan study takes me about one minute. A limited value study about a quarter of an hour, so that is why it is important to know the difference!

In this unit you will learn how to use color notans to help plan the color harmony in your painting and explore alternative color harmonies. 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 also explain when it is a good idea to do one of these studies and when you do not need to do them.

This unit is a companion to the six notan course units. It includes a gallery of thirty paintings together with the actual notan studies that were created before the paintings were done. This will help you see how this process works in actual practice.