Landscape Painting Exercises: Limited Focus, Shape, Color, and Notan

In my landscape painting workshops, I focus on the “big three” — simplification and massing, composition, and color. Painters usually work with a different subject for each exercise, but in one workshop painter Maggie Sharkey stayed with the same subject throughout the most of the workshop. This made for a cohesive demonstration of all the steps involved in developing a landscape painting in the studio. 

Limited Focus

The first act of simplification is a limited focus — imposing a “picture window” around the larger scene, which eliminates superfluous information and brings greater focus to the most important aspects of the composition. Here, Maggie eliminates more than 50 percent of her original photo, but in doing so, creates a composition that is less sprawling and more focused. Our eye moves nicely into the picture window and down the river. Note that the image has been converted to black and white. At this stage, when we only want to assess shapes and composition, color can actually complicate matters.

Simplification and Massing with Limited Values

This first exercise is designed to force the painter’s eye and hand toward simplification. I talk about the  importance of differentiation — the ability to distinguish values, shapes and colors from one another, and how that keeps the picture organized and helps build the suggestion of space. The 4-value exercise is one of my favorites, because it is always such a revelation to students. It is as much about value relationships as it is about simplification and massing. The goal is to translate the subject using just four values. (Also see Carlson’s Theory of Angles: The Four Value Divisions in Landscape Painting.) Shapes must be kept relatively flat without any blending in between the values. Of course, there are more than four values in the subject, so this exercise forces us to make choices. Which one of the few values available is the best choice for each area of the painting? It is quite amazing to see how much can be conveyed with such an economy of shapes and values — the very point of the exercise.

Instructions for doing this exercises appear in my book, The Landscape Painter’s Workbook: Essential Studies in Shape, Composition, and Color, pages 30–33.

Notan as a Compositional Study

With notan we push the limited values exercise further. By using just two or three values, the foundational shapes become even more clearly defined. And the more clearly we define our shapes, the more we will be able to see aspects of composition such as variation and movement. The notan is like a perceptual lens that allows us to explore the composition in its most irreducible shape-terms.

Such strict value limitations require the painter to make even more choices about how to interpret intermediate values. Which values will fall into white and which ones will fall into dark? Like the 4-value painting, the results can be a revelation. This exercise (even in thumbnail form) can be used as a study to evaluate the weight and distribution of shapes in a composition. 

More on notan
The Wisdom of Notan – A Brief Introduction 
Video Lesson: Exploring Composition through Shape and Notan.
Chapter 4- Notan and the Compositional Study, in The Landscape Painter’s Workbook

Color Strategy

When we look at nature we never say, That just doesn’t look harmonious! Because natural light is real, it never fails to be convincing. But for artists who paint not with sunlight, but pigments on canvas, harmony doesn’t happen by accident. It happens through the use of a structured color plan or strategy. A strategy is like a recipe for harmony — a set of color relationships that are proven to work well and can be used as a formula for building our color composition. Like the musician who composes in a particular key, in order to maintain certain types of harmonic relationships, the colorist relies on a strategy to maintain a cohesive relationship among the colors.

When painters talk about the color strategy, however, they are usually referring to the color relationships found on the color wheel: monochromatic, analogous, complementary, split-complementary and triadic.

These “color wheel” relationships are more properly called hue interactions, and are just one aspect of a complete color strategy. A complete color strategy also involves two other vital aspects of color, value contrasts and relative saturation.

I encourage painters to explore different strategies at the outset, to see how all these different factors combine to produce different results. (Also see Getting the Light Right: The Power of the Color Study.)

In Maggie’s studies below, each one explores a different strategy. “Although the lessons on limited focus, shapes, and notan and 4-value studies were all excellent, the part of the class that really opened my eyes was color strategy,” says Maggie. “I have always relied strictly upon observation for color and wondered how I could possibly get out of that rut and be more expressive. By learning about the effects of hue interactions (complementary, analogous, etc.), and neutral and high-key expressive strategies, I now realize that I can make color choices before I start a painting and unify them with shape, value and composition to create a complete expression of the scene.”

---

Additional Resources

from Essential Concepts and Techniques for Plein Air and Studio PracticeChapter 5: Simplification and Massing

from The Landscape Painter’s Workbook: Essential Studies in Shape, Composition, and Color
Chapter 1- Shape Interpretation
Chapter 6 – The Complete Color Strategy

On this blog:

Value Divisions in Landscape

The Harmony of Neutrals

Demonstration: Exploring Composition Through a Limited Focus

Excerpt from Chapter 5: Simplification and Massing

Getting the Light Right: The Power of the Color Study