Notan: two, three, four values

Notan is a Japanese word for the pattern of light and dark in a picture, independent of everything else. Reduce any landscape to two values, black and white, and you can see immediately whether the design holds: is there one big light shape and one big dark shape? Do they interlock? Does the eye go somewhere? At three values you can see the halftone that holds them apart, and at four the picture is essentially finished. More steps add polish, not strength.

Corot composed in three. His foreground is a dark shape, his distance a light one, and his midground the halftone bridge between them. Cotman designed in three or four flat shapes before he drew a single moulding. Train yourself to see every subject this way: squint until it collapses into a few flat shapes, and draw the shapes first.

The practical drill is the two-inch thumbnail: three values, no lines, no detail, done in three minutes. If you cannot make the subject read at that size in three values, choose a different subject or a different crop.