MATTE PAINTING BREAKDOWN
Here you will see the breakdown of my last matte painting from the beautiful Ha Long Bay in Vietnam.
The main difficulty was to turn the scene from a bright dull day light to a sunset warm atmosphere.
FINAL PIECE "A Ha Long Sunset" personal work
Original plate, 4:3 format so it needs canvas extension here.
I need to know a bit where I want to go so taking references is an important moment to help you determine which direction you would like to go for your matte in terms of composition, lighting and atmoshpere.
I'm gonna need some more shots to extend my canvas so here is an idea of what I used to extend the right side and push the depth with something more interesting in the back.
After erasing what I did not need of the shot, blending with curves and color correction. See in the middle how I cut the picture and remove the dull grey sky of the main plate.
Now we have a nice and coherent far away mountains making the scene a bit more interesting with the path.
At this point, I already know I want to go to a sunset mood very warm and orangy so i picked a warm sky I shot in France at sunet. Even if it's still a daylight scene here I tried to remain coherent with the scene, in other words not having the sky too contrasged, or saturated compared to the rest of the landscape.
Let's place our sun light then.
A bit of haze and slight saturation
The quality of the shots were not too good for me so I decided to apply some more textures on the cliffs mountains and thus change a bit the original.
Some color changes with a bit more of blue cyan.
More haze in the back, to emphasize the distance a bit more. Orangy one though. addition od the sun reflection.
Let the magic begin, heavy curves playing a lot with Red channel then. Subtle sun flare inspired from references. I added some highlights too on the white rocks on the left as I should capture the light from the sun.
More haze again and subtle color change with more purple.
To go further I decided to put some typical red boat lights, paint their reflections in the water and heron birds as well in the sky for a bit of movement and romance!!!! ha ha!!!
The blurred vegetation in the very front is a good way to give more realislm to the shot itself.
More boat lights and vegetation , not overdoing it but it's just details giving more credibility, interest and mood to the scene till final piece.
Breakdown from Sebastien Hue and Shue-Digital
Please visit my website: www.shue-digital.com
