The Digital Matte Painting Handbook

Creating a Castle on a Hill

For your first matte painting, you’ll paint over a photo I took of a hill in Scotland. Because it’s the photographic source for your matte painting, it’s referred to as a plate. You can consider this matte painting your training-wheels project, because you don’t need to create the background. This image will be used as the basis for learning about perspective, delineating light and dark sides, and applying textures to achieve a photorealistic effect. Concentrate on coming up with a visually compelling concept that you’ll use to complete the next several chapters.

Let’s first take a closer look at the plate you’ll be painting over (see Figure 3-1). This scene is relatively neutral, so you’ll be able to set different ...