ENVIRONMENTAL GUIDELINES
VETERAN MATTE PAINTER CONRAD ALLAN SHARES HIS ADVICE FOR ARTISTS JUST GETTING STARTED IN ENVIRONMENT WORK
UNDERSTAND PERSPECTIVE
Perspective is something that you can’t fake as much as you think you can. When you’re combining two images in Photoshop, you can only move the horizon line and distort the image by about 15% before it starts to look off. Perspective also means understanding the scale of elements you’re adding to your scene. Often I see beginner artists get this wrong – they might have something like a castle on a cliffside but the castle is three times bigger than it should be. Study your perspective!
STUDY LIGHTING IN-DEPTH
Something that catapulted my progression in matte painting was my understanding of light from my work in Vue. I had played around with sliders for thousands of hours, testing different effects and getting to know what they all meant. By the end of my time using Vue, I was able to construct any lighting environment I wanted. When it came to working in Photoshop, I discovered that I had enough understanding to reverse engineer the process and break down the light in a scene so that I could reconstruct it the way I wanted. This usually gets lumped in with ‘grading’ or ‘compositing’ or ‘colour matching’, which it is, but the underlying understanding mostly stems from your understanding of light. After all, we only see because there is light.
CONSIDER YOUR SCENE’S PLACE
One sure way of breaking realism in your work is to mix elements that shouldn’t go together. Things like adding a pine tree to a snowy alpine mountain or having pine trees in a tropical lagoon. These are obvious examples, but there are tons of more subtle ways to break immersion and realism. It would take too long to cover the examples, but the point to take away here is to ask yourself the question when adding something to your scene: “would this exist here in nature?” If you’re not sure, Google is your friend, search the kind of environments you’re trying to recreate.
DON’T WATCH TOO MANY TUTORIALS
This is sometimes counterintuitive, but these days there is so much free content out there that you could watch tutorials your entire week and get no practice. My rule of thumb is to do three projects (big or small) in between each tutorial you watch. Obviously use this rule with flexibility, but generally speaking, the point is that you want to be spending much more time on your own, testing and experimenting and exercising your skills than watching tutorial videos.
FIND A MENTOR
A little out of the box here, but having a mentor while you’re learning is going to accelerate your skills much faster than going it alone. If you can’t find someone to mentor you, try to find a small community to lean on. You’ll be surprised how many people out there want to help others. The idea of a mentor isn’t to have them help you with all your struggles, they are there to help you with the big issues, but they’re also there to help you when you get burnt out, when you are offered your first freelance gig, and to join in your celebration when you finally make it.