This
tutorial is actually a "making of"
where I explain how I proceeded to achieve
this matte painting.
I use a Wacom Intuos² A4 board, if you
don't have any graphic board this is going
to be hard but not impossible.
At each step of the matte painting, useless
to remind you to create a new layer so that
the work will be easier and mistakes avoided
!
First
of all, find a good res picture. I chose
to use a picture of a house I found on
the web. You can find very nice pics for
free, just look around !
The
first step is to isolate the house by
putting it on a separate layer and by
erasing the rest.
In this example I used the polygonal
lasso tool for the house, and a soft
eraser for the bushes.
Now
you need a new background. You can either
find a good pic, either paint one yourself.
I chose the former because it is less
time consuming, and the result is far
better than what I would have gotten
had I painted a background myself. I
found this image on the web, unfortunately
I do not remember the site I got it
from.
Put
the sky behind the house (by putting the
sky layer under the house layer), and
apply a little perspective effect to give
more depth to the sky, make it less flat.
Here the house picture was taken from
a low angle, which makes our work easier.
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Now
look at the edges of the house. They still
are the color of the original sky. We'll
fix that.
Using
the magic wand tool, select the empty
zone of the house layer. Then, Select
> Modify > Expand, to make your
selection wider. Pick a value that includes
the zone we need to color correct.
In the menu : Image > Adjust > Hue
/ Saturation and color correct the edges
by matching them with the color of the
roof.
Still
using Hue / Saturation and also Color
Balance, adjust the colors of the house
and sky layers so that they perfectly
blend together.
Now
we want to get rid of that palm tree that
hides a part of the house. That tree has
nothing to do there since we want to create
a morbid mood.
This is probably the most delicate step
because we have to hand paint the missing
part of the house. For that I mostly
used the clone stamp tool, tool that
allows you to paint something using
another part of the picture for reference.
For instance, the tiles located between
the lower and middle windows were painted
using similar tiles of the house, using
the clone stamp tool.
