The Hormoneous Arrangement of Dark and Light Shapes Notan is the harmonious arrangement of the dark and light shapes in a picture. In Japanese, notan means dark light harmony. There is no direct English translation. A world designed arrangement of dark and light creates an impression of beauty regardless of either the colours used or of the subject matter. This means that no-tan design is therefore the key to a strong painting. Without it, both colour and line cannot by themselves create a beautiful painting. Many of the old master paintings have very simple no-tan structures and also have very few shapes. For example, many of Monay's masterpieces are just two values. As you can see here, if we convert this picture to black and white. Here we have just dark shapes. And light shapes. So you can see that very simple no-tan structures can produce very strong compositions. We call this type of painting a two-value no-tan. This is a no-tan that has just a dark value and a light value. And often this type of no-tan is created by the effect of a dark object silhouetted against a backlight. The other French impressionists learned a lot about no-tan from the Japanese master print makers. For example, in this painting by De Ga, we can again see two values. We have a dark shapes. And we have light shapes. And these dark and light shapes make up the whole painting. The second most common type of no-tan structure is the three-value no-tan structure. This structure is the basis of many beautiful paintings, such as this painting by De Ga. If we convert this painting to black and white, you can see the three values. We have a dark value, a series of light value shapes, and some grey shapes. Here is another example of a three-value no-tan structure in this painting by Sargent. Again, if we look at it in three values, we can see dark values, light value shapes, and grey shapes. And this simple three-value structure is the basis of many great masterpieces. The last type of no-tan structure that is commonly seen is the four-value no-tan structure. Here we have a light value, a dark value, and then two grey values, a light and a dark grey. Here's an example. If we convert this painting to black and white, we can see the light shape here, a series of dark shapes, and then two greys, the light grey and the dark grey. Let's look at another example, in this case, a more complicated painting by Turner. Yet if we look at this again in black and white, we can find the same four values. Here's the light shape, the dark shapes, our light grey, and our dark grey. So you can see that, in studying a large number of great masters, I found that they nearly always have strong two, three, or four-value no-tan structures. And these very simple structures create very beautiful paintings.