I recently took a class in digital matte painting, taught by animator and VFX artist Jesse Silver (TRON, SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES, BATMAN & ROBIN). I've been using Photoshop extensively for years, but seeing how it could be applied in this way was really a lot of fun. It was just an introductory class for this kind of 2D work, but it gave me some really good challenges (read: hours and hours of homework!) and I enjoyed it enormously. I've only begun to learn this stuff, and hope to understand more of it in the future.

Below are two class execises I did where I used a variety of photographic sources to create a final product. The first was an image of the Great Wall of China, which required finding photos online and assembling them to match a basic layout storyboard sketch.


This is the final product. Below are the source elements.

Wall foreground.

Sky element.


Wall background elements.


Cliff and mountain elements.



Rock foreground elements.

The second exercise was "merging" different photographs of a city street, then adding new buildings to it while maintaining a uniform color scheme and the proper vanishing points. While most people simply put the buildings in the background, I tried breaking the picture apart and inserting the new buildings between the old ones.

 

The final product.

The source photos that needed to be merged.

These were the new buildings I added.

A little addition I added in the background for fun.
It gave the class a big laugh.

 

 




 

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