Notan landscape

Well, I have been a blogging slacker! But, in my defense, I have been pretty busy since getting back from Costa Rica. I have been taking classes and teaching classes, and trying to keep caught up with everything in between. In February, I took a two day workshop with landscape painter Mitch Albala. The focus was on exploring composition through the Japanese principles of notan. We did lots and lots of composition studies in simple black marker, worked up to gray scale marker sketches and…

Learn to use light and dark areas in your drawings, so they stand out. This is week 8 of my drawing challenge to learn how to draw kawaii in 6 months.

I never posted it here... two value 'notan' practice with some ruins (man, I love me some ruins). #art #artists #artistsontwitter #landscape #landscapes #sketch #sketches #drawing #drawings #study #artstudy #notan #myart

Notan is a useful tool for artists. It is used in the planning stage of a piece to improve the composition of the final artwork.

The Japanese concept of "notan" is a compositional strategy based around seeing shapes of light and dark. A good notan drawing will simplify the full range of a subject’s values into a powerful black and white design.

🔺Λyan Nag on Instagram: "Sharing some master Notan studies I did recently. Thanks, @squatchgouache for introducing me to these. Limiting myself o only 3 values, I have to really be conscious of what my goal for the study is. Superfun stuff! I definitely recommend you guys try it out! #MasterPaints #artistworkout #values #photoshopart #edgarpayne"

In this post, I’ll be discussing why you should give a damn about Notan, how it grows out of line-composition, exercises from the book you might like to try, and how we can learn from the Masters by “notanizing” their compositions. In the next post, I’ll be sharing some examples of Notan-making “in

In the previous blog post “Light as it Falls on Form,” I discussed the use of value relationships as a means of creating the sculptural aspects of representational painting. For this post, I'd like to

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