Wow, what a great class we had yesterday applying Notan design to an actual painting!  All of the students "got it", including our brand new student who joined the class yesterday.  Using photographs of selected scenes, the students worked up Notan sketches then toned their canvases.  Next compositions were sketched onto the canvases and underpainted using a number 5 gray on the value scale.  Interestingly, we ran into a problem when we realized some students' value scales used black as #1 and some used white as #1 value!  No matter, however, because 5 always fell in the middle.  The confusion began when I asked them to first lay in colors using values 6 and abovewhere they underpainted value 5, and for some that meant light values.  So if you're doing this at home just remember to lay in your DARK value colors FIRST.  Then proceed to the light value colors in the "white", unpainted areas of your canvas.  By the way, this exercise is great for teaching the values of paint hues as well.

Since everyone works in acrylics in this class, we discovered that softening edges using this method became difficult.  This was remedied, however, by leaving soft edges on the dark values and saving some of those mixtures for when we began applying light value colors.  Takes practice but everyone managed to get the idea. 

Everyone was excited to see their paintings develop so quickly, thanks in part to my constant pushing some of the normally slow poke, meticulous painters who all say they want to "loosen up", by the way.  By the end of class everyone went home happy with nearly completed paintings and I went home exhausted...but happy, too.  I love teaching!