 Welcome to Monet Café, Artistic Friends! I'm very excited to bring you a beginner series where I will be focusing on some simple steps for beginners, breaking down the painting process to help you understand it better and create more beautiful paintings. The first will be focusing on simple beginnings, how to simplify your subject to create what's called a notan. It's basically a grayscale drawing and it will help your composition, color, value, everything be stronger in your painting and I think it's going to be very beneficial to you. So let's get started. But first of all, please pardon me while I introduce my line of clothing that I have designed, t-shirts, and other products with the happy painting slogan I always close my show with. Now I have set up a coupon code that you can use to get 10% off. When you check out, use the promo code Artistic. All in caps, it's valid until August 15th. Now I have all kinds of products. I have coffee mugs, I have tote bags, I have shirts of all colors, I even have baby onesies and they all come in either gray, pink, white, or black. So you have a choice of so many different products and if you want to order any of these, you just click underneath the description of this video. You'll see some little items. You can click on any of them and it'll take you to the Monet Café Art Store and I have other products. I'm going to be adding even more. But there's some fun different products on there. One of them says artist better than therapy. We know that's right. And basically having these products is fun for you guys, but also helps me hopefully to keep these free videos coming your way so I'll never have to charge for them. So I appreciate your support. Now let's get started. So basically what is a notan and why would you want to use one? A notan is the harmonious arrangement of light and dark shapes in a painting. In Japanese, notan means light, dark harmony. And I thought it was interesting that there's actually not a direct English translation for this word. So what it is, it's basically well designed arrangements of dark and light to create an impression of beauty, regardless of the colors used or the subject matter. This means that the notan design is a key to a strong painting. Without it, both color and light by themselves can't create a beautiful painting. So it's really all about the composition and the strength of the values in the painting. Many of the old master paintings have very simple notan structures. They also have very few shapes. For example, take this particular Monet masterpiece. And if I convert this to its notan, it's really two basic values, as you can see here in this way that I've transformed it. When it's converted to black and white, we just have dark and light shapes. And so when we can learn to see things in dark and light, we can create stronger compositions without all the fuss of getting so into all the color, all of the details. So it's a really great way for beginners to get started. So join me in this lesson where I will create numerous simplified notans. And I'm also going to provide some links, HTML links in the about section of the video, so that you can click and see the photos that I'm working from. They're my own photos, so you're free to use them. And you can create along with me or just practice on your own. All right, let's get started. Now the first thing we need with any painting is some inspiration. And it's always best to try to get your own photographs when you can. I know that's not always an option, especially when you're first starting out. So just be sure. If you're just practicing, it's fine. You can use any photograph to practice with as long as you're not going to try to sell your work. But if you'd like some copyright free images, I'll share some links of places where you can find those. Now I have, oh, keep in mind too, that if you're ever entering artwork into a competition, it's pretty typical that you need to paint from your own images, okay? Even if they're not copy written, use your own images for that. But what I do is I, this was just a little suggestion from another artist. It's just to keep a whole bunch of little reference images on hand that you can always refer to. So I have a lot of little photos, things that I've taken pictures of that I keep. And I just, it's nice and handy and quick to just pull it out. And I find working from these small images is actually preferable. It keeps me away from the fussy details. All right. For this first one, I'm going to use a photograph that's actually in an area of Live Oak, Florida. And it's just a nice, beautiful field here. And I liked some of the sweeping motion here. So first, I've got to look at, it's a, this is a pretty wide format here. And I, I don't want my image to be quite that wide. I'll be working from more of a standard size. So I know I'm going to lose some of this side here, okay? So I've got to determine what is it that I like about this? And what I like is how it actually almost looks like it has a path that was maybe mode to go almost in a road direction, drawing the eye into it. I always love paintings and I tend to lean towards things that have a lot of layers to them and where you can see in the distance because that is so fun to kind of intensify that feeling of depth in your painting. And we can do that with some neat little art tricks, okay? So I'm going to take this and I'm going to do a little value study and try to capture those things I said that I like about the image. What is it I want to express? And I have a neat little, little recycled sketchbook. And these are kind of neat. I know you can work from just little pieces of paper if you like. But these are neat because you can kind of keep them in your, keep all the ones you've done before and, oh, I got a little fuzz here, and refer back to them. You may even sometimes want to go back to one of the value studies you've done before and use it just for getting creative, okay? So let's go ahead and break this one down. And you've got a couple of options when it comes to, that paper is messed up, when it comes to what you use to do these. You can use artist Karen Margulis recommends markers, just light, medium, and dark. I've got four here actually. I just got these on Amazon. It came with a set of 10, but you don't need that many. So you're just looking for a dark, a medium, and a light. So you could do it with that. You can do it with just using some charcoal and varying your pressure or the hardness of your lines or the thickness of your lines. You could do it with just pencil the same way. Sometimes they make pencil or they do make pencils that are different darkness or hardness. And I've got a few here that are like that. The 6B is the darkest and then the HB and the 4H. So when you don't have to have any fancy tools, I've often just used a plain old pencil to get my value study just by using different pressures, okay? So for this example, I'm going to be using the markers. And I've got to look here, okay, where is I often just look at where things are on the page. I can see that this tree is really about halfway down, even maybe a little more in this composition, okay? So let me go ahead and sketch something in here. I'll just use one of the medium markers to sketch in. Alright, so I know I've got my tree here. It's kind of big and got a lot of shape and it comes out. I'm gonna fold this. Alright, there we go. So it comes out not quite halfway into it, okay? So I've got my tree shape here. It's gonna come down pretty far, okay? So here we go with the tree and nothing has to be great with this, okay? I know I've got this nice sweeping motion that's curving this way, okay? I like that, okay? And I know it comes like right out from the tree here and it sweeps and curves around. I just really like it. Where does that end? It ends about halfway over here, okay? So I'm always using my um actually that's a little low. My um proportions and what I'm working with. Now I know this tree's gonna be kind of the darkest thing in the um in the value study, okay? I also like how this field is kind of curving back here, okay? And then I can push those trees back. So I've got kind of another um like sweeping curve that's going on right here and then I've got some of these trees in the background here, okay? So we've got another grouping of trees back in here. We've got some trees in here that are a little bit um bigger than those but smaller than these, all right? They're a little further away, all right? So we just got a few trees and they kind of come down on the land here, okay? So that looks really simple, doesn't it? So let's add in our darks, our mediums and our lights, all right? I'm using the chiseled edge of this and I'm just gonna kind of get in this um tree shape here, okay? So we've got this and again look how basic and simple this is. You don't certainly don't need a lot of detail with this. Now I know these are gonna be more of the medium value. Let me grab that one. Again, I'll use the chiseled edge on this. So I'm just gonna get me in some tree shapes over here and they're gradually getting smaller as they go back and then I'm gonna get my lightest one. I think it's this one. Let me see. Well, this one's uh yeah, that's pretty light but I'm going to vary my lines here and I'm not worried about really tree shapes in this. I'll uh I'll go back and refine that. Um now, I know the sky is going to be the lightest thing. The land is going to be fairly light because the sun is shining on it and the trees vertical things are almost always darker than the flat land, okay? But I know that this uh background land here is going to be I think I have a little bit lighter. It's gonna be pretty light back in there, all right? So we've got um we've got our land that's kind of light, okay? We've got sun shining on the grasses and then we've got this. I'll make some little bit of darker um marks here just to kind of intensify that sweeping motion, okay? So we've got a little bit more of this sweeping coming around here. I could even take and make more some um chunky marks here because we know as we get closer to the foreground these grasses and things are going to get bigger. Now, see how I did this directionally to kind of get that sense of motion, okay? So now we've got a little bit of an idea for um for how we're going to approach this and those are always great to do before you start a painting, okay? Kind of work out any issues. Now let's go ahead and do a couple more. I might speed these up but just so you can kind of get the hang of things. I hope you will practice these on your own and have a lot of fun because this is really a great way to start a painting. I will have some clickable HTML links in the about section of this video which will take you right to these images that I've used. They're my images so you're feel free to use them to do these notans to paint whatever um as long as it will help you grow as an artist. Now stay tuned because there's going to be more beginner videos on the way and when you do all of these in succession I pray they will just help you become a better artist. Now keep an eye out on this channel because more beginner series videos are to come where I will be taking each one of these little notan sketches and creating a painting each episode or each painting with a particular lesson specifically for the beginner. So as you can see here I am doing the one with the trees and the shadows and shadows actually happens to be the subject matter topic for our August Painting Challenge in our Monet Cafe Art Group. And in this next lesson I'll be sharing a really awesome neat new way that I've discovered to do an underpainting. I think beginners will love this. It's a neat product you you might can guess what it is but stay tuned for the next video for more exciting fun lots of learning for the beginner and I hope you'll join me. Alright guys happy painting!