Matte Painting Assignment + feelings on it.

Hello everyone! My name is Jonathan Lawrence Dillard and i am here with another entry for you guys to view/read.

So a couple weeks ago my intro to digital painting class started working on what the pros call a 'matte painting'.

Now i actually never heard of a matte painting before, I've heard of matte paint, which its not as shiny as metallic or glossy but a matte painting? I was interested to learn.

We saw some videos of how they used matte paintings in Star Wars and it was pretty cool. We also saw footage of how they use the techniques in current media and shows like Game of Thrones. But the only difference is they seem to use more 3D models these days. Which is cool, but i kept thinking we would do the same. We were not.

Even when doing research for matte paintings i kept finding videos of people doing it with 3D models, which, again, is awesome, but i needed to see how to start it in a non-3D model form.

I found some vids and tutorials and then i proceeded to get to work.

Now i will honestly say, while working on this it felt very graphic designer heavy. The techniques to create the environment is to take other photos that our professor provided and make a scene using them. The theme was castle. It felt as if we didn't really have to do anything painterly, that bothered me a little since this is well a digital painting class. Which i guess it is still painting but a different approach and im okay with that.  I must say, it did make use of our knowledge of atmospheric perspective with terms such as extreme foreground, foreground, mid-ground, background and extreme background.

I typed enough now lets see the final painting!

Im proud of how it came out, considering i didn't really know what i was doing. I did sketch an idea a couple weeks back that i was going to draw out traditionally but it felt appropriate to use for this assignment. My first crack at this didnt go so smoothly, i was going to do a fire castle scene and my references were just very pixelated so that was a no go.

I painted on some spots throughout this because well i wanted to feel like i painted something rather than sticking images together and making them all have similar colors to match. My teacher noted it and said i should keep some foreground elements sharp, but deep down i enjoy the painterly look. Maybe because i had fun while working on it. If the fun goes away well, then i have to start questioning my decision to become a better artist.

So i hope you guys enjoy this quick assignment we got. We only had approximately one week to work on it and i think i did pretty well.

Thank you again for reading and viewing.

Until my next assignment have a good day!

Ps. Oh, i also never want to work on another matte painting ever again lol, maybe if i can learn how to implement 3D models.