Notan for Portrait Design

I started practising portrait drawings by following tutorials and online courses. The results got better at a steady pace but I found myself spending quite a while on each study. At the back of my mind I wanted to have one of these perfect sketchbooks that you see with everything finalised and looking great. Not long ago I flipped that method and just started rough sketching as many heads on a page as I could in pencil and I felt my drafting skills improved greatly. There are still lots of angles and features that are weakness areas in my drawing, but working through them at volume has helped me to quickly pinpoint those weaknesses, take a note and if I get round to it dedicate a page to practising these elements. I'm far from the imagination stage of drawing heads, but I draw using construction to help me place the perspective before I begin adding any other details. I always work from reference (Pinterest) and that meant I was continuously judging the analogue levels of light and shadow.

For this page, I added an additional element to my sketches: every single head got run through the Notan Generator before I inked it, reducing each reference down to a flat value map first. This saved my brain the effort of reading light and shadow straight off the photo by instinct. The tool also has a threshold slider that I used to work on some compositions until I was happy with the amount of information shared using just black and white.

I note here that the notan doesn't replace the reference -- I'm still working from the photo the whole time to bridge my understanding between the two. Ideally this will help train my observations to interpret these values without having to run through a tool. What it gives me is the composition and design of the shading, worked out separately, before I bring the two together on the page. The real value of it that I've found isn't accuracy, it's watching how a few shapes can be interpreted as a clear read of a face. That's where I've begun to find true value in utilising these types of studies. I'll hopefully be extending this into still lifes and landscapes in the future.

Notan studies of heads and hands

The main sketchbook entry I produced from this study is a cluster of heads with hands in the compositions. That wasn't incidental: hands are a weak spot I'm actively pushing on right now because they provide opportunity to add so much expressiveness to a piece that complements the expression and gesture. Combining this with the notan study, it's amazing to observe how much a face -- or a hand -- can be interpreted and still read correctly with only two values to work with, and I certainly felt the value in observing in this way.

Not every sketchbook head is a keeper

I used the opportunity to run through some individual sketches as well during this study. I want to highlight how these are not perfect, and the likely best use I can see is in planning, design and warming up prior to painting or rendering. A sketchbook page doesn't have to be a set of finished portraits -- some heads land better than others, done at different points and different speeds, and that's fine. One of the biggest realisations I've had recently is that a sketchbook is for practising at volume without needing every attempt to be good. The point isn't the individual result, it's the repetition and lessons learned throughout the process. It's led to me filling up more sketchbooks now, and I date them so I can look back and see how much I've improved.

Construction lines behind the ink

I wanted to include the above drawing, left with its pencil underdrawing showing, because it's worth being upfront that I never inked these freehand straight from the reference. There's a construction pass underneath first that helps me to work out proportions before committing in ink -- and that's still a skill I'm working on at the moment. Leaving the pencil visible on this one is a way of recording part of the process behind the inked result.

This particular reference didn't stop here, either -- it later got a full coloured pencil rendering, which shows up in Pushing Past My Comfort Zone in Coloured Pencil.

What this notan exercise taught me

What stuck with me after this exercise wasn't any single head -- it was how much information two flat values can carry, and how much flexibility that gives you to interpret rather than copy. That's where notan will now become an integrated part of my process moving forward: not as a rendering aid, but as a design and composition study.

As an additional exercise to this, I spent about 30 minutes on two additional colour studies, as a rough test of whether the same observation of simplified shapes held up once the value buckets become colour pairs instead of just black and white. That's really its own experiment though, worth a proper post of its own in future.