MATTE PAINTING
Here below is a breakdown of a recent matte painting I did as personal work. This one is called "On Horseback".
The original plate is from depositphoto platform here: depositphoto_credit
Hope you will enjoy it.
Breakdown video below to see the evolution detailed in this project.
VIDEO PROCESS
BREAKDOWN
Here we go step by step
Compo sketch and light source idea
Matching photo
Rescale of the mountain with desaturation and addition of the very top of the mountain with stamp tool and painting.
I erased the original plate sky to replace by a more dramatic one according to the lighting I defined in my precomp sketch.
Addition of an other mountain bit on the right to fill the space a bit and I started darkened the bottom of the mountain that should not be that lighted.
Painting of the foreground with a sort of rocky thing to create something tangible for a character to stand and I painted some sort of steps into the rocks to make like an existing path for my character.
...and here comes the horseman, notion of human scale.
OK horses from Nepal are really skilled horses to go into the mountain, ha ha!!!
Close-up of the horseman
Time to play with curves and color corrections to give a bit of idea of the mood I'm looking for.
It helps the progression for me and defines the value even more. You will see that I play a lot with color variation alongside as I don't know for sure which color palette I want till the very end.
I also put some sort of subtle godrays on the right mountain top to imply that the light direction even more.
Trying some subtle colder effects and trying to figure out which mood I want for the scene maybe rather stormy here.
With a very soft round brush I started to paint ona layer some orange color set on Overlay mode with low opacity to warm up the sun light as I would rather go for a nice sunset color scale.
Snow is white, and so very reflective so it needed to be underlined by painting with some subtle spots of highlight reflection. Add a new layer, paint it with 100% black and set it on Color Dodge mode. Then with soft brush and low opacitiy just paint where you need to highlight a bit it should react pretty effectively..
I added very softly with a large soft brush some white for more hazy atmo on the top and where the light is.
Playing with filters again to bring a subtle pink color and have a coherent gradient transition.
I added very softly with a large soft brush some white for more hazy atmo on the top and where the light is.
More contrast and saturation here. We are almost there!!
Some sharpening, final adjustments and some birds up there for a bit of movement into the scene.
THANKS FOR WATCHING
by
SHUE-DIGITAL
