Hello everyone! I’m a student, looking to get into matte painting. I’d love a critique on this piece. Anything you have to offer, I’d love feedback!
Moonlit Hills - critique?
seemaschere
#2
Welcome to the digital mattepainting forum Kate :wavey:
All landscape painting has similar base properties like balancing your colors across the painting to achieve harmony. Mattepainting also takes this to the next level by adding a photorealistic quality to it all 
When you are starting out it is a good idea to find photos first that you can aim towards. Not for copy and pasting but so you can pretend you were there, took the photo, turned around and your mattepainting captures what you saw facing the other direction. Or a similar situation to the one I just described :wise:
You’ve done a great first step by roughing in a sketch. Now you will have to :lightbulb analyze your overall lighting, color and values before you start overlaying textures and photographs. This forum is the perfect place to be presenting your work in progress. Keep it up 
kenmccuen
#3
Hi Kate C,
It’s a nice image and conveys a lot of personality! Nice work.
The ice and snow you have in the bottom left is a nice element… might be interesting to find other places throughout the composition to place that snow to balance it.
Right now my eye goes right to the bottom edge and sort of stays there… there is so much contrast there right in that spot.
The funny thing is your water-mark is creating a nice potential for a negative/positive shape there… you could disperse some of that snow/ice at the bottom of that hill in a similar pattern to the swirly brackets of your water-mark… same rough shape.
Maybe at this point assemble a bunch of photo reference of this time of day/this type of environment and analyze your reference for consistent elements that you can pull from to enhance the realism.
If this was a concept I was working with at work I could see my supervisor/art director asking for additional bg elements. Maybe some vague shapes of hills much further in the distance would create some nice depth… something to experiment with. 
Great concept so far!
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