See the value structure

Value does the work; colour gets the credit

Notan is a Japanese word for the harmony of light and dark. Reduce a scene to two values and you see its skeleton: the big shapes that carry a painting from across the room. If the notan is weak, no amount of colour will save it; if it is strong, the colour can do almost anything.

How to use it

• Two values find the design. Look for the mother shape, the single largest connected dark, and check that light and dark interlock rather than sitting in stripes.
• Three values are a watercolour plan: paper and first wash, the middle wash, the darks. Tap a band to isolate it and see every place that will share one wash.
• Four to five is where most finished paintings live. Beyond that the study gets fussy; go back to three when you lose the big picture.
• Compare your painting with its reference using the same splits. Watercolour dries lighter, so the most common drift is darks that never got dark enough.

Squint until the details go, and the painting that is left is the one you need to paint.