Strengthen Your Compositions and Simplify Your Shapes

How and Why I Make Notans

The free demo I did yesterday is up on Youtube, and you can check it out. Learn about making notans and applying them to your painting process. Here’s the layout-

1) I start at the end, with a finished painting and notan, and unpack the relationship between the two. Why do I make notans? How do they affect the painting process and guide me? (hint: it’s all about wet into wet shapes, and layers!)

2) I go back to the beginning. I make a notan, starting with my reference photo and the Notanizer app. This is all about building a composition that leads the eye through the picture plane, bonding shapes together to create “paths of transit”, and figuring out what to do with my middle values. I talk a lot about “local contrast” here and introduce the idea of “the Hourglass”, where we funnel down all the values available to just 2. The neck of the hourglass is the notan.

3) I introduce this weekend’s workshop on Composition and Notans! :D I only teach these subjects once a year, and enrollment for this batch closes at the end of Thursday. If you’re exploring Composition and Notans and looking for a mental framework to apply, a lab to explore and test things out, and a place to receive feedback… then these classes are for you. https://stephenberryart.com/zoom-workshops

4) We repaint the painting from the beginning, applying the completed notan to the painting process. I come back to the idea of the “hourglass” again. Now we are on the other side of the neck. I open back up the available values, but this time with the notan as our guide.

If you’d like to paint along, here is the reference photo and the supersized notan I did for it—