LIGHT DARK HARMONY

Tone is also known as ‘Value’. Value is what you get when you take an image, suck all the colour out of it and see it in shades of grey.   The Japanese call it ‘Notan’. 

‘Notan’ literally means "light dark harmony". Artist’s use ‘Notan studies’ to explore different arrangements of light and dark elements in a painting, without having the distraction of other elements like colour, texture and finer details.

It is the underlying value structure of your painting in its simplest form.

There is a saying: ‘Tone does all the work but colour gets all the glory’

If your image does not work in simple tones, then it definitely won’t work when you add colour so it is important that it feels ‘balanced’ at this stage.

To achieve balance use the ‘mostly, some and a bit’ rule… making sure one value predominates. In other words it should cover more than half of the painting. The other 2 values should be divided unequally.

Here we have mostly lights, some midtones and, a bit of dark. Squint your eyes to see the tones more clearly.

Light Dark Harmony

Simple tonal sketches before you begin painting help to plot out the tones…each one has a different feel to it depending on where you place the emphasis.

I’ve gone for no 1 in my painting, but also like no 5…the way the midtine tree connects with the midtone sky and middle distance horizontal band of bushes…also how the tree tops puncture the sky. In no 6 the small tree is not tall enough to do this and the composition is not as strong as a result.

The diagonal bands form a ‘Z’ shape behind the focal point (trees). Were these bands to be horizontal, the piece would feel far less dynamic.

Colour getting all the glory here…and rightly so! Mother Nature is quite something!