What i love about matte painting is the thought that i knew what i wanted to be before i even knew the job existed.
For many years i couldn't decide what field of art/design i wanted to embrace, for me i was very much a jack of all trades, master of none, with a general interest in anything creative and visual. I left school with little formal education and worked in retail for a few years, then a in my early 20s an unexpected break moved me into the newspapers as a production artworker, from there i went freelance as an ilustrator, then designer, photographer, 3d artist, painter, motion graphics i even took a brief interest in fashion design! at one time or another i tried everything and in many ways i guess they provided me with the foundation of what i do today, 3d continued to be a strong focus. However during that time i never quite felt content, they paid well but something was missing. I had a general interest in everything but no passion for one subject.
Then a few years ago i slowly became unknowingly interested in the subject of creating photorealistic environments, taking photos of landscapes and changing them in such a way that was unnoticable, adding buildings, castles, ruins. This led me to partecipate in a few compitions i came across in the CG forums, one such painting i did was for a competition that involved creating a matte painting of Atlantis, i didn't have a clue what a matte painting was but i knew the requirements were to create a photorealistic render of the lost city and this was something i felt confident i could do. I approached this vigerously and made use of everything i knew. I completed third in the contest if i remember correctly, that was good enough for me to realise i could do something better than the average artist. I had unknowingly focused my skills into the field of creating photorealistic paintings, the skills used by a matte painter.
(this image is available as a print at
www.imagekind.com)
Still not sure quite what this matte painting was, i did everything i could to find out only to discover that not much information existed on the subject, but enough to understand this was something that i not only felt a calling to, but also realised as a child i had always been facsinated by the impossible backdrops i'd seen in the movies, in fact these scenes were the eye candy that i waited eagerly to see in films, like the scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark where the camera pulls out to reveal a never ending warehouse full of crates. I was blown away by this shot every time i saw the film and i instinctively knew it was a painting. So many other films came by where i was awed by the environments that looked photorealistic but i knew were paintings. In some ways i think back then they were forced beauty shots intended to have impact and the painting attracted too much attention. These shots had a lasting impact that remained burried in the back of my mind. It wasn't until i began researching the subject that my early fascination with these paintings resurfaced and everything clicked into place. I knew this was something i wanted to do, something i wanted to commit myself to learning more about. Moving on a few years i compiled enough work to blag my way into the industry, at first working on TV commercials, then various dramas and finally into the movies, the rest as they say is history. Right now my career as a matte painter in the film world is taking shape. I have a few credits under my belt, including Prince Caspian (Narnia), Me & Orson Welles, Where the Wild Things Are, Avatar and Clash of the Titans.
