Dream Worlds: Production Design for Animation

VALUES

The lights and darks of any color are called values. Normally these values are the result of light in nature. Where there is a lot of light, you get the lightest value – white; in the darkest shadow areas you get black. There is of course a scale of mid-values in different shades of grey. We reduce these middle tones to only three. It makes them easier to work with.

There are different ways to arrange scaled value steps in your sketch. Define the foreground, one or two middle ground areas, and then the background. In case you want to arrange the values realistically, your foreground might be the darkest, and your background the lightest tone. But even in nature you will find a situation where the sky is the darkest value and a middle-ground ...