Proko - Project - Notan Master Thumbnails

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Project - Notan Master Thumbnails

Stan Prokopenko

in Drawing Basics

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Drawing BasicsFull course (185 lessons)

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You’ll learn the most important foundational concepts for drawing anything and soon you’ll be drawing pictures out of your imagination or from reference.

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About instructor

Stan Prokopenko

Founder of Proko, artist and teacher of drawing, painting, and anatomy. I try to make my lessons fun and ultra packed with information.

assignments 451 submissions

A quick tip about big, medium, and small shapes. Maybe it helps someone out there.

DOWNLOADS

zip

reference-images.zip

17 MB

mp4

project-notan-master-thumbnails.mp4

250 MB

txt

project-notan-master-thumbnails-transcript-english.txt

7 kB

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project-notan-master-thumbnails-transcript-spanish.txt

7 kB

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project-notan-master-thumbnails-captions-english.srt

11 kB

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project-notan-master-thumbnails-captions-spanish.srt

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ASSIGNMENTS

Level 1: Two to Three Value Studies

In this project, you'll do Value Thumbnails to help you see value relationships and organize them into groups. You'll simplify the drawings into just 2 or 3 values. This practice will improve your ability to observe and interpret values in your drawings.

Thumbnails are small sketches. They are intentionally small to help you avoid drawing details. Don't draw the details! Focus on designing the large shapes and assigning them a value.

Reference

In the downloads, you’ll find several images of master paintings. Use the images I provided, and if there's another master painting you're excited about, feel free to study it as well.

Two-Value Studies

Two-value drawings (Notan) use just lights and darks. You'll choose a threshold: anything lighter goes into lights, anything darker into darks. This threshold is up to you, based on your interpretation of the image.

Lights
Darks

Three-Value Studies

Optionally, incorporate a mid value into your thumbnails. The mid value is useful for areas that aren't clearly light or dark and could belong to either group. Including this value helps to categorize those ambiguous areas.

Lights
Mids
Darks

Level 2: Still Life Photos

For more challenge, set up your own still life, compose, light, and photograph it. Use a direct and clear light source to create distinct light and dark areas. Choose a subject that interests you.

Then, do value thumbnail studies from your photo. This is harder since you're working from a photo, not a master paintings, which have a lot of the composing, designing, and simplifying already done. Photos present raw details and noise. You'll need to filter out unnecessary information, focusing on big shapes and value groups. Fight the urge to include all the details.

Remember, this project isn't about beautiful drawings. It's about improving specific skills to help you make beautiful drawings later.

Deadline - submit by Nov 15, 2024 for a chance to be in the critique video!

@nabilkaz

•

I'm coming back to this project after a bit of a hiatus. Choose a few Sargent paintings just to force a fresh perspective from it. Included the photos and 2- and 3-Value filters (I did this after the thumbnails and drawings). On Repose I had trouble figuring out how much of the detail to lose in the dress and tried to just use time as a forcing function (limited it to 30-45 minutes for large and around 5-10 min on the thumbnails). Would love any feedback

Camille Varner Kolafa

•

21h

These are fantastic, I LOVE The Daughters one! Assigning the 3 values to it makes it look so spooky! I think you did a really successful job of seeing the value relationships in both. For the dress, it might help if you squint at your reference or edit it to make it blurry, that way more detail is lost so you can focus on the bigger shapes of value. I definitely see where you had trouble with the dress, specifically with those darkest values in the middle. If you make those shapes bigger, and bring the darkest value in to the right end of the couch more, I think it would help balance it a lot.

Alice Charlington

•

really enjoyed this project

Aura

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Hello world! Finally made the time to finish these. I feel like I’ve made 800 of these, esp the Sargent painting.

Camille Varner Kolafa

•

These look lovely, I especially love the bag of tomatoes. That is a challenging object to reference for this project since the bag is so reflective and wrinkly!

Jonah Jenkins

•

12d

Definitely a struggle, which means it was good practice 🫠 I was so worried about getting the right shape design that the values were hard to focus on as well. Perhaps more construction lines would have helped, but I was worried about putting those down to dark 😬

Rain Kipper

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25d

My attempt. I like shading topic...

Axel Gyllenstierna

•

29d

Level 1 projects. Hoping to get feedback before I start/finish the level 2 versions. Main takeaway: To make focal points pop, match the exposure scale to the main subject's value: set low exposure (light-leaning cutoff thresholds) for dark subjects, and high exposure (dark-leaning cutoff thresholds) for light subjects. I only just realized this on the last studies (the Sorollas)!

Axel Gyllenstierna

•

29d

Also, simplifying sufficiently was easily as difficult as the values...

Håkon Antonsen

•

30d

Here's my first attempt. With 2 and 3 values. Did the one with 2 first, and there were large parts of the picture I thought should be somewhere in the middle, so I thought the version with 3 values would be much simpler. It wasn't. Apart from the woman's face looking like Ditto, I am reasonably happy with how it turned out - which I think means I don't really know what to look for. So I am looking forward to feedback.

Melanie Scearce

•

29d

You have the right idea here, in terms of simplifying the value shapes! Your 2 value study looks good to me. The simplification to the major shapes makes sense. I think your 3 value study is overall too light. This is a mid-key painting, so the middle values dominate the composition. There's a bit too much lightest value shapes in the 3 value study to achieve the same effect at the painting. I'd encourage you to keep going with that one and fill in with more darker value shapes, see what you can come up with! Doing a few small simplified thumbnails will help you plan out a larger value study, so you might find it beneficial to experiment a bit before diving back in.

@jfd

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1mo

Fun project. Although I had a hard time finding the right balance in terms of shape details, especially at first.

K. Williams

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2mo

Hope I'm doing these right. Sorry about the shine!

@jonliebers

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2mo

Tried some more with these Sargent’s

Mitchell Jackson

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2mo

This was an interesting project. I didn't really know what to do with #11 & #13.

Hernan Rueda

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2mo

I found this project really interesting! If someone have any advice feel free to comment.

@pablo_dispatch

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2mo

Here's my submission. The portraits went really smoothly, while everything even a little bit landscape-y was a struggle, especially the one by Richard Schmid, just couldn't grasp the values and shapes on that one. I have a hunch that I should've gone even smaller digitally, as I tended to dive into details too much, especially with the earlier references :)

@brimarie

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2mo

A very enriching and valuable exercise—but the change in perspective also gave me a headache ;-)

Tommy Pinedo

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2mo

Nice! Good job on these! Also welcome back I haven’t seen you in a while!

Elijah R

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2mo

I need some help. Trying to find the shadow shapes for natural objects is oddly very difficult for me. I think some of the show shapes for the trees could be better but I’m not sure how. Any thoughts would help.

Ghost

•

3mo

Much more challenging than I expected

Elijah R

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2mo

Nice shadow shapes :)

Jose Anton

•

3mo

project level 1 and 2

Darren

•

3mo

Alexandre Frazao

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3mo

Such a great exercise, and such a great way to meet new (old) masters. It’s so funny to compare my chubby version with such a slim figure.

@notapirate

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3mo

SCHOOL IS DONE!!!!!!!!!! And finally, I was able to do this assignment, and I think I did an okay job! So, the first studies I did were digital, and I took images from Twitter (x). Now, since it's been a month since I did the first study, I have lost most of the people whose image I used as a reference, which is really unfortunate. However, I do still have two of them (Their names are at the bottom). So I DO want to let everyone who reads this know that I did just images from other people. The Second study I did was on paper. I use a 2B and a (I think, it doesn't say) 2HB, and MAN, the studies with people in them were really hard to do for me, so I dumb everything down to shapes. I also made some mistakes, where for the first reference, I got super focused on the window that I ended up making it bigger, and not at the same angle as the reference, and I'm too lazy to fix or redo that. I AM happy with the Joaguin Sorolla and the Edgar Payne. I did try doing the boat, but I couldn't get the boat placement down and kinda got a little mad. However, I'm still going to work on the value study, and I'm happy that I did this :D. (おさる- @osaru_photo) (poetical photos. - @poeticalphotos) I wish I could post the names of the other people here :C