Main content
Pixar in a Box
Course: Pixar in a Box > Unit 2
Lesson 4: Visual language | 4Tone
Tone, or shading, helps direct a viewer's eye and creates mood. Light values feel open and fun, while dark values feel mysterious or sad. Contrast is the difference between light and dark values. Low contrast creates calm moods, while high contrast creates excitement or drama. Artists use tone to guide viewers' focus and create emotions.
Want to join the conversation?
- I think that athis facial expression and what he said implies something but I don't really understand what. If someone picks up what it is can you tell me? 4:59(10 votes)
- His expression showed some kind of playfulness, and his eyes were quite wide and warm, so I think he might be wanting us to be ourselves and not be shy for a while.(9 votes)
- how do you draw tht good its so cool and so hard(1 vote)
- Nearly all artists start out drawing silly stick figures like anyone else. You get accurate by learning to judge proportions and angles accurately, and developing the habit of constantly measuring and checking your work.
Learning to draw is more about patience and discipline than some sort of magic vision. You learn to make sure everything is laid out on the page in the right spot before adding any detail. Beginners tend to dive right into details before getting the underlying foundation right - the techniques themselves are fairly simple, they just take practice.(9 votes)
- Do the people reviewing the storyboards usually review their own or someone else’s storyboards? Or is it just random?(2 votes)
- Getting feedback from someone else is extremely helpful for someone in the storyboarding stage; however, the person making the storyboard may also review their work and adjust it as needed before showing it to other people.(0 votes)
- What tone of voice do they use?(1 vote)
- can the tone change drasctilly throughout the story?(1 vote)
- “Right next to the whitest light area”? Or is there something like that near the end of the video?
What does that mean?(1 vote) - ati didnt notice the circle 3:18(1 vote)
- Notice atwhen Bing Bong is on the wagon he is darker colored because he is going to jump off? 0:51(0 votes)
- That's a really interesting thought! I would say most likely that was done on purpose; many of the subtle details in these films are very intentional, as the Pixar crew has been showing us in these lessons. The interpretation of these details may be different if you ask different people. I definitely agree with you on that one, though.(2 votes)
- Um, I noticed they used the different type of paper when showing the dawings, Are these originals?(0 votes)
- yep, petty sure they are and because of that I worry that the markers will sink though the the paper to the original.(1 vote)
- ''it was a good video i like it''(0 votes)
Video transcript
- In addition to line,
shape, and perspective, another tool we use to
direct the viewer's eye and support story points is
tone, also known as shading. By adjusting the lightness and darkness of all the elements in your scene, you can both lead your audience's eye and create a specific mood. Light values can feel
open, fun, or lighthearted, while dark values can create
an atmosphere of mystery, sadness, or something ominous. Another concept is contrast. It's the difference between neighboring light and dark values. Low contrast means that
there is not much difference between the light and dark values. This can create a subdued or calm mood. Higher contrast puts very dark and very light colors next to each other. This can create the feeling of excitement, drama, agitation, or conflict. Contrast also allows us
to direct the viewer's eye because our eyes naturally move first to the point of highest contrast. To see this in action, let's ask our artists how they use tone. - In this image from
Up, well, first of all, the perspective is leading your eye, the one point perspective
is leading your eye to the focal point, which is Carl's house. Everything in the
foreground is really dark, which is kind of like a framing element, and because of the lightness
of the color in the background, there's an implied
sense of like, going up. - So if you look at this image, there's basically two different values. There's the value in the background, which is this medium light gray, and it kind of pulls everything in and you have like this light area here, so when you have the contrast
between light and dark, it automatically makes
your eye look there, and the darkest point in
the image is the characters. So they have the darkest gray right next to the lightest white area, which automatically just shows you exactly where you wanna look, and then this light gray back
here kind of pulls you in from the edges of the frame to
show you where you wanna go. - It's really fun to
kind of play with tone and say, okay, these
characters are sort of dark from the background, but
that room is also really dark and how do you delineate that? Well, we thought having
this shaft of light coming from outside would
be an interesting way to sort of light these characters up, and it creates this tension point. It's almost like dark versus light and where they meet creates this energy. You can see this really strong rim light against the characters here, and that's sort of where
your eye's being drawn is to where that sort of activity
and that conflict happens. - This panel from Cars 3 really uses tone to help us understand where our eyes should be looking right off the bat, but if we just look at
the gray areas, the tone, there's a couple of
interesting things happening. We treat tone like light
in real environments here as we're doing these drawings. If you look closely, there
are a couple different shapes that are happening with the tone that help our eye know where to look. There's a huge circle
happening with the primary tone that really helps focus our eye into the high contrast
area of the whiter area where a lot of the texture of
the line work is happening. There's also, it's subtle, but there's a secondary box
of tone that is happening. It's a different dynamic shape, and again, you're using tone as shape, as a spot lit shape to help pool light, to help create a stage and
create a sense of direction for where your eyes should be looking. - With this image, I used
it a little bit differently. This one was more about the emotion, so this like a dark
moment for McQueen here. He just realized after all the
racing on the beach this day, he's not fast as he wants to be and he's not where he needs to be in order to win the race against Storm, so there's a slight gradient
from the bottom here that leads up and it almost gives you like a feeling of failure and loss. So, a gradient is basically just going from one value to another
in the same thing. So if you look at the overall
shape of McQueen here, it stays the same and
then over top, I used tone as a gradient so it's almost
like when you're shading, it goes from the darkest value
here to the lightest there, and you can see it here, so
if I was to cross hatch it, it would slowly get bigger as it goes up, so you have your darkest down
there and it slowly rises and it gives him almost like the feeling of like a haze over top
of him or like a fog that's in between him emotionally, and it makes you, the audience, feel a little bit more of
how he's feeling in his head. - In summary, using
tone, we can create mood, direct the viewer's eye,
and control what information gets revealed to the audience. In the next exercise you'll
have a chance to play with this. Go and get messy.