Anatomy of a Painting

This project started when someone from the Wet Canvas Landscape forum asked me to do a works-in-progress demonstrating how I use the Notan. What follows is the birth and evolving of a painting. I hope you are as entertained as I was while doing it.

This is my photo reference. It's my front yard right outside my studio window early one morning
after it had been raining all night.

Here is my notan. When I select my subject, I first squint my eyes and find a pattern of lights that create a light path. Then within that path, I find a pattern of darks that connect literally and/or visually. With a black marker, I do a quick tiny sketch where I map out those darks in black. The sketch is never any larger than 1 x 2 inches. What I'm looking for is a composition of darks that keep the eye moving within my newly discovered light path. Notice above, I discovered I had an S pattern of lights. one of several classic pattern of lights used by artists.

Here is the finished painting. See the deer and the puddles? Notan provides the structure for the painting, but the creative process provides what happens to subject and content. The deer and the puddles invited themselves in order to complete the meaning of the painting. Following is how it all happened:


I select one to three transparent colors that are complements of the local color in the scene.	Next I make a wash of these with Turpenoid.	Using a cheap Chinese bristle brush (from hardware store), I quickly mass in the wash to serve as an underpainting. For this painting, I used red-violet behind where greens will be and burnt orange behind where blues or blue-grays will be.
Referring to the notan, not the source, I lift out with rag...	...and with brush the total light pattern. I keep lifting lights and adjusting darks until I have a notan that is as identical to my little sketch as I can make it.	Next, with a bristle brush, I begin to rough in the drawing.
Time for some palette talk. How I set up my palette is just as important to my painting process as anything I do. Being a dyslectic, I have to have things organized for minimum confusion. I line all dark, transparents on the left, all middle-value/opaques along the upper edge, and all the lights along the right size and , as I mix llights, the lower edge.	One of my most valuable tools is this little Gray Scale & Value Finder (from Jerry's for about $2) which I can hold up between my eye and the subject, squint looking through the little slots and see what value range I'm looking at.	Back to the painting. I'm now massing in darkest darks using a #6 bristle brush, working from the dark transparent side of the palette only.
Sidebar--Maggie naps at my feet while I'm painting.	I'm massing in dark-mids, those are the middle values leaning toward dark, within the dark of the notan	Any time I'm working in the middle value range, whether dark-mids or light-mids, I mix from the middle-value secton of the palette. My self-imposed rule is always mix darks into mids or mids into darks and lights into mids or mids into lights, but never mix dark into lights while painting.
Now I'm massing in the lightest values, working on the light side of the notan.	I don't really develop the colors of the light side of the palette until this phase of the painting.	I begin what I call "Phase 2" of the painting. I go back and find variations within the darkest darks, but I switch from a bristle brush to a soft brush. Another self-imposed rule is to use bristles directly on the canvas, but use softs when painting wet-into-wet.
From now forward, I follow a habitual pattern of working: I work in the dark areas, then the middle value areas, then the light areas. I move from one value area to another, getting my clues from my subject matter. At this point, the notan sketch becomes less important to what I do, yet I make sure throughout the painting that the notan of the painting stays intact. To quote Edgar Whitney, "The character of your painting is resolved in pattern."	And the following shots show how the painting developed as I moved from one value area to another,.	Here, I'm defining shadows in the light and mid-value forground
Here I began to feel the painting was nearing completion, but the foreground was meaningless. I begin to think about what could be happening there, what have I seen happening in our yard.	And look what happened here. The idea began with the puddles, then the deer made her way into the scene.	Now I began to enhance the lights.
It's editing time. Look at how that tree grows right out of the deer's butt. (Bad focus here; don't know why.)	Corrected that. Added more lights.	Adjusted and softened the lights. Tweaked a bit here and there. and an almost finished painting.

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