my first matte painting

[Photoshopped]

Hi pencildj,

You have got a nice conceptual idea going on here but there are a lot of things that I think could be improved to make this more realistic and believable.

What works for me:
#The far right buildings
#The boat and part of the sea
#The background land area

Things don't dont work and need improving:
#The sky - although I actually think that the sky you have looks dramatic, there are evident quality and scale issues. I can also see lots of jpeg compression artifacts too. Maybe you have scaled or compressed this image too much?
#The buildings way in the background on the mountains - saturation and colour
Also, if you look at the far right area of buildings that I said worked well. On one side of them (right) the tree area looks good and works well. On the other side (left area going into sea) It does not. I would add more texture so that they look like the rightside.

I hope these comments help you improve your composition and please don't be put off. This isn't bad for your first attempt.

All the best,

Jay

[JJASSO]

I agree with the comment above , matte painting is not just a matter of putting things together, first I recommend that you think about and idea , ok you got it here, now how will it look good?? visual composition is the first step , it comes along concept and design , you have some nice idea of this bahia city , but how can you lead the viewer's eye where you want it, after you have thought about this issues , you must start collecting all the assets in this case high res photos

use this links to get some nice high resolution photos

www,morguefile.com

www.pbase.com (http://www.pbase.com)

I also recommend that you go trough all the tutorials in this matte painting forum , I'm sure you will learn a lot about composition, perspective, color and techniques in photoshop

see other artist's matte painting , try to study why did they do that or why are those elements like that, you will get a clear idea of focal nodes

[kami1314]

thanks both of u have been helpfull indeed. i will go read the tuts

[Suirebit]

in addition to what these guys said, you might wanna read http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=3275&page for some composition tips from our very own Philip :)

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