I tried my best to learn Matte painting at my best, in which lots of mine friend help me with video tutorial and lots of inspiration arts. I agree that yet I am not good enough in Matte painting but I am trying.
While watching lots of tutorials I have jot down some important points about Matte painting as following.
- Use plate for matte painting, plate is nothing but a digital photo, which help us to know the horizon, vanishing point and perspective as that was already present in the photo.
- While blocking shapes use various colors from the plate only so that the shapes will not look fake or pasted.
- Set your light source so that you can paint light, highlight and shadow.
- Whenever you get confused about the shadow, take help of 3D application. Draw basic boxes and planes and use light which cast shadow. It surely give you real shadow flow and position.
- Use dry type brush to draw an object and play with the opacity of brush to show shadow and highlight.
- For haze and mist rather than using any brush use soft brush it help to merge that in our composition.
- If you are using "pen tablet" set brush opacity to pen pressure so that harder you press brush more it look thick.
- Rather than painting every stuff manually use photos as texture and just paint on them.
- Use less amount of detail where objects are very far from the camera.
- Rotate canvas horizontal to vertical so that you get idea about your composition mistakes.
- Zoom out till composition look like thumbnail, it may sound funny but when you look composition in thumbnail you will know how your detail is looking and where to add more detail.
