Matte Painting Exercise - Painting into a plate
Like 1 Dislike 0 Published on 17 Oct 2012
This a practice exercise you can do, just set aside an hour to do one every week. You paint into an existing plate, by examining the elements of the plate, sampling colours, and working your way down layer after layer. This method should take some of the intimidation factor out of painting realistically due to the fact you start off with so little information when zoomed out, then as you work your way forward you only need to deal with a tiny bit of new info each time. Allowing your brain to filter that info and create "happy accidents" ..
1. pick your colours (blur a copy of the image to pick a handful of base colours to start) you can always colour pick from the image as you go too, but start with a few base colours
2. plop down a blob where you want to work
3. zoom far out until it's postage stamp sized and scribble with a 100% opacity from colours within the image. Work that shape until it looks somewhat right. This is an organic process so don't feel locked to any specific borders.
4. once you feel it's looking kind of right. Zoom in a little bit, the result should be that it looks a LITTLE messy but not overwhelming. Refine it so it looks better. Use a lower opacity at this point to help colours blend. 20-50% opacity should make sure you end up with a lot of colour variation. Also try to alt pick through the photo a fair bit too,
5. Rinse and repeat.. keep zooming in and refining the image one step at a time. This process will allow you to "see" forms within the chaos that "feel" right.. just like we see bunny rabbits and dragons in clouds.. so too will we see new rock forms and details from the rough zoomed out scribble.
6. eventually you will move PAST your desired resolution. This is to make sure you've refined enough details that so when you zoom back out, it looks like a lot of crisp little details. It's often the case when you see a painting from far away that it looks more realistic, same idea here..