first try at matte painting (composite)

[ravells]

Wow, it's really tough...Here's my first effort. Long, long way to go before I get half way decent at this.

[NeonKnight]

OK, that is cool.

Is this actual brush and paint painting or Computer painting?

[ravells]

Thanks....I can't draw or paint for toffee, it's a composite of different images - sorry should have said 'matte composite' and not 'matte painting'. The Castle and foreground, the knight, the panorama at the back and the sky. At the moment I'm working on making sure that the perspective and the lighting work properly along with improving my cut out abilities.

[RobA]

Fixed the title And let me add that you keep impressing me with your more artistic endeavours!

-Rob A>

[jaerdaph]

Again, I'm reminded of all those beautiful matte paintings from Star Trek TOS.

[pyrandon]

This is nothing to sneeze at! I like it! I think the only thing really in need of fixing in the painting is the bright blue: it is so discordant with the rest of the color scheme, which could be a point of interest, but it's too bright for the environment; in this atmosphere, realistically speaking, there would be red/yellow highlights & shadows over that blue, so it would not seem so bright. Something to play with?

Great job! Did you have fun making it?

[ravells]

Wow! Very nice! What did they teach you? Any tips for us self taught types??

[Steel General]

That's really quite good Midgard. *applauds*

[Midgardsormr]

Thank you. The most useful thing I picked up was (in Photoshop) image > calculations to improve the contrast of the channels to make extracting a background easier. It's still not easy to seperate blue fish from the blue water, though.

It's best to start with a concept of what you want to make, sketch it out and paint over the sketch, then find images to match that rather than trying to just cram together images that you like.

Don't hesitate to skew, stretch and squash photographs to fit the shapes you need. The clone tool can be used to extend edges.

When dealing with buildings, a polygon lasso selection of one side of the building lets you skew it into a new perspective. I didn't get the opportunity to really use that since I didn't use any nice, clean buildings. I could have tried it on the ruins, but they're so tiny that I don't think the perspective is an issue.

There are probably lots of other things I could mention, but it all blends together in my head. There's a really good DVD from Gnomon on the subject that I watched part of. I need to watch the whole thing soon.

[ravells]

Thanks Mid, I think I might go back to making matte's myself soon again too.