Misty Blue Mountain Lake Matte Painting

In this section, I will show the process and the application of the teachings of the Matte Painting course: Creating imaginary worlds, taught by Reha Sakar, following the established steps to develop my project.
I will start with the analysis of the photographs, the choice of the composition, the development of the sketch, the integration of the visual elements, the color correction, the correction of lights and shadows, and concluding with the retouching of final details, postproduction and rendering.

• Software used: Adobe Photoshop
• Stock from: Envato Elements & Photobash

First, I choose the type of weather, time of day and mood I want to create in my project; then I look for photographs that fit these criteria.
I observe in each photograph how the different elements of nature interact, such as fog, sun reflection, atmospheric perspective, and chromatic scale.

In this step, what I did was to determine the fundamental basis of my project: the “Composition”, where I analyze and determine which compositional rule will be used in this project.
I chose the “Golden Spiral” because, for me, it is the one that best suits my project and also because it is used by my favorite artists and movies. These are some of my compositional references:

First, I made three simple black and white sketches based on the analysis of the photographs and the composition, to have a much more concrete idea of what I wanted to achieve in my painting. This helped me to better establish the composition and the mood I wanted to convey with my painting.
From the three sketches, I chose the one that best suited my general idea.

With the composition and mood well established, I already had a much clearer idea of what I wanted for my project. I started looking for stock images to integrate into my matte painting.
I used approximately 40 images in order to develop this project.
I used stock images from: Photobash and Envato Elements.

This is the step I liked the most, where I started to shape my world, which was born from an idea. I used all the information that had been developed in the previous steps.
This is just a summary; in reality, it is an extensive process that consists of integrating each photographic element in its place, making chromatic corrections, light and shadow corrections, applying perspectives and adding small details to achieve a consistent and realistic result throughout the matte painting.

If you follow all the steps, you can achieve something amazing. I am honestly amazed at the result I got from my matte painting. This course has taught me to be more methodical and consistent with what I want to achieve. I hope that like me you enjoy the process, more than the result, because it is worth the effort.
Thank you very much, Reha Sakar, for sharing your knowledge.