First Attempt At Matte Painting Ever!

[phoenix]

Hello

Nice image infact beautiful, so here are my notes...

1. color composition is good the overall gradient of hue.
2. The perspective alignment / direction is impressive and but also distracting i mean shifts the centre of interest towards the right side. but over all its looks nice.
3. i am little confused with the lighting, kind of doesn't fit together...the lighting of the water fall and green belt is good in fact lovely and sets a very nice mood. But the lighting of the sky at the back confuses me.
there needs to be another sun or a big reflector that throws off the softness at front of the image, cause the light source is at the back. also if you should add that orange tint to the ambiance cause the environment is little tinted at this time of the day that is dusk / dawn i think indicated by the color of the sun.
4. the dull green trees at the back of the castle dont match up. they are ones that are killing the picture.

thats it i think ...hope this is helpful thanks....

regards

[ths-acid]

Ok thanks for the great constructive criticism, I appreciate it. Also I will defiantly fix some of the lighting issues and will fix those trees in the back. lol now that I look at those background trees are way off on color, lol.


thanks again.

[CybrGfx]

Actually, the background trees are FAR preferable to the "Emerald City" things in the front.
I CANNOT believe you painted the cliffs emerald green! GAH! The sick yellow tone to the clouds in the sky does not help this image at all...
Back in the "Olden Days" of real photography, BEFORE Kodak invented Kodachrome color film, pictures used to be hand tinted, usually with flat, oversaturated colors of sometimes odd hues. This looks like one of those.

The two words you need to tape to the top of your monitor when you are doing matte work, are CONSISTENCY, and SUBTLETY. The idea of a matte painting is NOT to just slap a bunch of visual elements together in some form of PhotoMontage. Contrary to your assumption, GOOD matte painting is NOT mere photomanipulation...They are NOT really similar, any more than a dull broadaxe is similar to a surgical scalpel...

Like ANY artwork, Composition and Design is as vital a skill as being able to cut an image from its background. While you show some promise with the latter, the former is escaping you. Your colors are all over the visual spectrum, and the overall composition is bad. Technically, the tree issue (green cliffs especially!), combined with the color of the water, the inconsistency of light sources, and the overall placement and proportion of your elements makes this a somewhat sub-standard photomanipulation, never mind a matte painting. It looks like it took about 2 hours, of which an hour and a half was wasted working on a bad composition.What can I do to improve? What is wrong with the picture? What can make it better?To Improve: Research and STUDY some matte paintings. Be able to list 3 matte painters whose work you admire. Do at least 3-5 matte painting tutorials before trying to create your own. You are trying to paint a Cadillac when you've only ever seen photos of a Volkswagen.

This honestly isn't even a good landscape. It is NOWHERE near a matte painting.

What can you do to make this picture better? Nothing. The amount of time and energy that you would need to expend JUST to make it passable is NOT worth it. Better to start completely over from scratch, this time putting forth the effort to create a compositional rough of the scene BEFORE you start cutting and pasting. That means designing a visual flow to the piece, not just some building stuck in the middle of a canvas, with a huge sky above, a huge waterfall below, and a bunch of funky green cliffs in front...

~C

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.