Notan
Notan is from the Japanese word, meaning dark-light. In art, it is a pleasing value contrast in design. The japanese call this expression in beauty and harmony of darks and lights 'visual music'. The concept is to have dark shapes against light shapes and the converse in an interesting pattern. So, if you were to compose your painting using pure black and white; with harmony and balance, the finished results will also be successful. I scanned in some thumbnails which I started playing around with for compositions. From these I pick the best to further develop into a painting. For the fun of it I took photos of completed paintings and used the Photoshop Stamp filter to see what they would look like in pure black and white. This one seems the most successful. Below are thumbnails sketches