There is a test you can run on any picture in about thirty seconds that will tell you whether the composition works. Reduce it to two tones — pure black and pure white, nothing in between — and look at what is left. If the image still reads, if you can still tell what it is and where your eye goes, the composition is sound. If it collapses into a grey mush of disconnected fragments, no amount of rendering will save it.
That test is called notan, and it is probably the highest-value habit in representational picture-making that most people have never heard of.
What notan means
Notan (濃淡) is a Japanese term usually translated as “light–dark harmony.” The two characters mean roughly thick and thin, or dense and sparse — the concentration of ink on paper. It refers to the arrangement of light and dark masses in a design, considered as a thing in its own right, separate from subject, colour and detail.
The idea is older than its Western adoption. It runs through Japanese ink painting, woodblock printing and family crests (mon), where a design has to work at small scale in two flat tones and nothing else. A crest that only reads when you can see fine detail is a failed crest.
Notan entered Western art education largely through Arthur Wesley Dow, an American painter and teacher who encountered Japanese design principles in the 1890s and built them into his influential 1899 book Composition. Dow taught that a picture is built from three elements — line, notan and colour — and that notan is the one students neglect. Georgia O'Keeffe studied under him, and the influence is visible in the flat, massed shapes of her work.
Why only two values?
The severity is the point. Two values force a binary decision about every part of the image: is this area part of the light mass or the dark mass? There is no hedging, no “slightly darker,” no room to defer the decision by rendering a gradient. You have to commit, and committing is what reveals whether the design has structure.
It also removes the thing that most often flatters a weak composition: detail. A picture can be full of beautifully rendered passages and still be badly composed, and detail hides that. Strip it out and what remains is the skeleton.
You will notice something in that sequence: the four-tone version still looks like a photograph, the three-tone version starts to look like a design, and the two-tone version looks like a decision. That progression is the whole exercise.
Positive and negative space
Notan is inseparable from the relationship between positive and negative space. When you reduce an image to two tones, the “background” stops being background. It becomes a shape with its own contour, sitting in the design with equal weight to the subject.
This is why the classic notan exercise uses cut paper rather than paint. You take a black square, cut shapes out of it, and paste both the cut-out pieces and the remaining frame onto white. Because every piece of black you remove creates an identically shaped piece of white, you cannot avoid seeing that the two are the same act. Most beginners design the subject and let the background happen. Notan makes that impossible.
How to make a notan study
Three approaches, in increasing order of speed:
Cut paper. The traditional method and still the best for learning. Black paper, scissors or a knife, white card to mount on. It is slow, which is a feature — you commit to each cut, and you cannot fiddle. Start with a 5 inch square and give yourself twenty minutes.
Marker or ink. A black brush pen on white paper, working at thumbnail size. Faster than cutting, and the brush's reluctance to make small marks helps keep you honest about scale. Do not outline the shape and fill it in — that produces a drawing with black inside it, not a notan. Lay the mass down directly.
Digital. Convert a reference to greyscale and posterise it to two levels. This is what the SketchKit notan maker does — upload a photo, switch to greyscale, drag the levels to 2. It takes about five seconds, which makes it useful for a different purpose: testing many compositions quickly, or checking a reference before you commit hours to painting it.
Upload a reference to the free notan maker, switch to greyscale and set the tone levels to 2. Everything runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
Use the digital route for testing and the analogue routes for learning. Cutting paper builds judgement in a way that dragging a slider does not, because the slider makes the decision for you.
Reading a notan example
When you look at a notan, ask three questions:
Do the masses connect? Strong compositions tend to have a few large connected shapes rather than many small isolated ones. If your darks are scattered across the frame like islands, the eye has nowhere to travel and the image feels restless.
Is there a clear dominance? Roughly speaking, one value should own more of the picture than the other — a common guideline is something like 70/30 or 80/20. A picture split 50/50 between light and dark often reads as unresolved, because neither mass is clearly the ground the other sits in.
Where does your eye land? In a two-value image the eye goes to the point of greatest contrast and to isolated shapes. If that lands somewhere other than your intended focal point, you have found a real problem while it is still cheap to fix.
Notan design ideas to practise on
If you want to build the skill deliberately, these are worth working through:
- A tree against sky. The classic, because the negative shapes between branches are as important as the branches. Almost impossible to fake.
- A single figure in a doorway. Forces you to think about a dark mass inside a light frame, or the reverse.
- Cast shadows on steps or stairs. The shadow shapes are the design; the objects casting them are almost incidental.
- Backlit anything. Backlighting collapses subjects into silhouette naturally, which makes it the easiest way to see notan working in the real world.
- A cluttered still life. The hard case. Reduce it and watch it fall apart, then rearrange the objects until it does not.
- Your own finished paintings. Uncomfortable but instructive. Run a piece you were happy with through two values and see whether it holds.
Notan and value studies are not the same thing
These get conflated constantly. A notan is usually two values and answers a design question: does this arrangement of masses work? A value study uses more steps — typically five to nine — and answers a tonal question: how light or dark is each area, and how do I mix that?
The order matters. Notan first, because it is fast and it tells you whether to continue at all. Value study second, once you have decided the composition is worth painting. Doing them in the other order means carefully measuring the tones of a picture that was never going to work.
If you want the tonal side, our guide to value in art covers the fundamentals, and five ways to check your values covers the practical workflow. The value checker handles the greyscale comparison.
Two mistakes to avoid
Outlining. If you draw the contour and then fill it in, you have made a coloured-in drawing. Notan is about masses, not edges. Put the shape down as a shape.
Working too large. A notan should be small — a few inches at most. Size invites detail, and detail is exactly what you are trying to remove. If you find yourself refining an edge, the study is too big.
Notan is not a style and it is not a finished product. It is a diagnostic you run before committing time, in the same way you would sketch a plan before building something. Thirty seconds, two values, one honest answer.