Guide

Notan: testing a composition in two values

Reduce the picture to black and white with nothing in between. If it still reads, you have a design. If it does not, no amount of brushwork will save it.

Notan is a Japanese term for the harmony of dark and light. As a working method it means reducing a scene to two values, black and white, and nothing in between, to test whether the composition holds up before any of the detail exists to distract you.

It is a brutal test, and that is the point. A picture that reads clearly as two flat shapes will survive almost anything you do to it afterwards. A picture that turns into confetti at two values is not going to be rescued by good brushwork.

What a notan study actually tells you

• Whether you have a design at all. If the darks scatter evenly across the picture, there is no structure holding it together.
• Where the eye goes. The largest contrast between the dark mass and the light mass is where a viewer looks first, whether or not that is your subject.
• Whether shapes are interlocking or floating. Dark shapes that connect to each other and to the edge of the canvas hold a composition. Dark shapes floating in isolation do not.
• Whether the lighting is doing anything. Flat, even light produces a flat, even notan, which is a good early warning that the reference is the problem and not your painting.

Two values or three

Start with two. Every pixel is either dark or light, the threshold decides where the line falls, and there is nowhere to hide. This is the classic notan and it is the one that answers the composition question.

Three values, where you keep a midtone, is a different tool. It is less about whether the composition works and more about how the halftones group, which becomes useful once you are planning the block-in. Use it second, not first.

How to make one

1. By squinting. Close your eyes until the scene is almost gone. What survives is roughly the notan. Free, instant, always available, and less precise than you would like.
2. With a brush. A small study in one dark colour and the white of the paper, thumbnail-sized. Fifteen minutes, and the size limit stops you drawing detail.
3. Digitally. Threshold the reference and slide the cut point around. The value of doing it this way is that you can move the threshold and watch which arrangement survives across a range, rather than trusting one guess.

What to do when the notan fails

Do not start painting and hope. Change the picture instead: crop tighter, move the light source, turn the subject, or merge shapes that are competing. It is far cheaper to fix at this stage than three hours into a canvas.

The most common fix is simply cropping in. Beginners almost always include too much background, and cutting it away usually joins the darks into a stronger mass at the same time.

If your notan looks scattered or confusing, treat that as information about the composition or the lighting rather than a failure of the study.

Written by Soren Ulsig. Last updated 2026-08-29.