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Matte Painting
Thomas51471 \| 03/24/2005 @407 \| edit post

I posted a topic yesterday about digital matte painting in another forum also.

I have been thinking ALOT about this because, quite frankly, I am coming to hate my day job. I am a graphic designer and thought that was what I wanted to be, and in a way I do, but advertsing and marketing is starting to kill me creativly because everything is a time issue. You can give people total crap just as long as it's within the deadline and they will love it. I am tired of that, I have been doing that for almost 10 years and it's getting old.

What I have always wanted to do, ever since I was a kid, was be a professional illustrator doing matte paintings, concepts and the like. It has only been recently - in the past 3 years or so - that the computer has made it faster and easier to create quality stuff for people that have the talent to use the tool (computer) as well as general artistic talent. Anyway, I decided to try my hand at digital painting and stuff.

As a kid I always loved fantasy art books that had pics of cities that had been wiped out and forests or jungles were growing in and around them and the buildings were destroyed. It always made me wonder what happened. So, I have started my own pic of this kind. I have posted it below. It is FAR from finished right now, but I think it is coming out pretty good so far for my first shot at this type of painting. I'll add more buildings and cool clouds that draws the viewer more to the center of the painting. I may or may not add small figures to this one, I am still on the fence about that, but if I don't on this one I will for sure do more with people. Lemme know what ya think.

Re: Matte Painting
Crow \| 03/24/2005 @576 \| edit post

at the moment it looks like it's built from tons of unconnected elements - it's quite flat too. Abandon smudge tool, by the way. Look at reference, see how people like Dusso, Craig Mullins and Dylan Cole work. I don't think you should add any elements now, you might be doing wisely by reducing the amount of elements in this one.

Try to keep the composition nice and simple, do a lot of sketches - it's the key to do succesful matte paintings. If you know how to paint, you know how to use photo-elements correctly. If you know how to achieve realism in speedpaintings, you'll be a good matte painter. If you know how light and color work, you'll be a good matte painter. If you don't know those things, you won't make good matte paintings.

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