Notan Painting with modification

notan inspired still life     click to enlarge

Every so often I like to paint in a workshop with others to hone old skills and learn new ones.  I'm in one for the month October, every Friday, and am having a ball.  The first two Fridays we worked in the Notan style -with some modification.  Notan is a Japanese design concept - it has to do with the placement and power of your lights and darks.  Rather than think about the objects represented in your subject, you squint and find big masses of dark and light shape and paint those in an almost abstract manner.
 
Similar to monochromatic value paintings.  The idea is that for any painting (abstract to realism) to work well, it is how you use your -lights and darks - that contributes to its success.

The 'modification' I mentioned above: rather than black and white as you'll see in most examples of notan, we used Gamblin's Portland Grays (light/medium/deep).  The contrast isn't as great as notan b/w but it really trains you to use choose your values carefully in order to get some interest going.

First I painted in all the deep gray masses; then the middle, then the light.  I used a tiny bit of white for highlight in the focal point and a few very thin lines of black to define an edge here and there.

An anonymous quote found long ago --a repeat here...  "Color gets all the credit.... but value does the heavy lifting."   I use all the time in my classes (and in my head in the studio!)

Here's a kettle I found in an article....  one color, lots of values. You see the values give it it's depth and personality. If you had only one or two values it would be a pretty flat boring kettle.  By managing values this little pot has lots of personality.

 

You might enjoy reading more about Notan here.