What is a notan?
A notan is a picture designed as flat light and dark shapes, with no shading or detail. The word is Japanese, nōtan (濃淡): 濃 means dark or thick and 淡 means pale or thin, according to Wikipedia’s article on nōtan. In Western art teaching it became an exercise in rendering a scene in black and white only, and today it usually means a quick sketch that captures the main light and dark masses of a scene.
The article draws a useful line: shading represents an object’s form and depth, while nōtan represents where it is placed. That is why a notan is usually made as a planning sketch before a painting.
2 value or 3 value notan?
Begin with 2 values; add a third only when the picture needs a middle plane to read.
| Notan | Values | What it tests |
|---|---|---|
| 2 value | Black and white | Whether the big shapes read and the dark and light areas are balanced |
| 3 value | Black, middle gray, white | Foreground, middle ground and background, or light, half tone and shadow |
| 4 or 5 value | Black, grays, white | A full value plan; see the value checker |
In the 3 value notan the middle tone is sRGB gray 119, which is lightness 50 on the CIE L* scale, halfway between black and white as the eye sees it.
How to use a notan for design
The notan is for decisions you make before painting. A few checks it makes easy:
- Are the dark shapes connected? Joined darks read as one strong shape; scattered darks make the picture look busy. Raise the blur until the small pieces merge and see what is left.
- Is one value in charge? The bars under the histogram give the share of the picture in each value. A design that is mostly light with a smaller dark shape, or the reverse, usually reads more clearly than an even split.
- Does it still work flipped? Flip the notan. If the balance falls apart in the mirror image, the composition leans on something other than the shapes.
- Does the focal point sit on the strongest contrast? Look for where the black and white shapes meet with the most edge. If it isn’t your subject, move the threshold or plan to change the values when you paint.
Try a few thresholds on the same reference. Each one is a different design, and choosing between them is the point of the exercise.
How the threshold works
Every pixel gets a lightness from 0 (black) to 100 (white), the CIE L* of its luminance 0.2126 R + 0.7152 G + 0.0722 B. Pixels below the threshold become black and the rest white. Dragging the line on the histogram moves that split, and the arrow keys move it one step at a time (hold Shift for 5).
Using perceived lightness instead of a plain average matters with saturated colour: a pure yellow has lightness 97 and lands in the light shape, and a pure blue has 32 and lands in the dark, even though both are 50% in HSL lightness.
Other ways to make a notan
| Method | What you do |
|---|---|
| By hand | Black marker or brush on white paper, or charcoal, working from a reference |
| Photoshop | A Threshold adjustment layer gives a 2 value notan, with its own histogram |
| Procreate | Adjustments > Hue, Saturation, Brightness to remove saturation, then paint the shapes on a layer above |
| Draw Paint Academy Notan Tool | A web page with one threshold and a blur slider (checked 2026-10-16) |
| This page | 2 to 5 values, draggable thresholds, blur, flip, PNG or layered PSD, in the browser |
A hand-made notan is still the better exercise for learning, because you decide every shape. A generated notan is a quick way to test a reference photo or check a finished piece.
What it doesn’t do
It doesn’t draw a notan the way an artist would: it doesn’t redraw edges, merge shapes by meaning, or drop distracting detail beyond what the blur removes. It works on one image at a time, and doesn’t open .procreate or .psd files directly; export a PNG first (for Procreate files, the Procreate to PNG tool does it in the browser).