Intro to Matte Painting

Learn to create breathtaking matte paintings using the same techniques as industry legend Maxx Burman. After studying the compositional foundations of the medium, Maxx will show you his techniques for turning quick concept sketches into production-ready matte paintings with realistic perspective, lighting, and atmosphere. Whether you’re an absolute beginner a or seasoned professional, there are a ton of simple, yet advanced techniques covered in this course to take your work to the next level.

Lesson 1
Concepts
It all starts with a sketch. Follow along as Maxx demonstrates the earliest steps of his matte painting process, by studying the history of the craft, understanding the principles of composition, and creating detailed thumbnail sketches. You’ll then learn to take your sketches and build upon them with basic photobashing techniques to give quick life to your first matte painting.

Lesson 2
Photobashing
Photobashing gets a bad rap these days, but Maxx is determined to change that. In this lesson, Maxx will show you his advanced techniques for integrating photos from different sources into a single piece, and how to give them a consistent look and feel. Building upon your concept from the previous lesson, use advanced Photoshop techniques to achieve seamless color, atmosphere, and lighting effects to finish your matte painting.

Lesson 3
Perspective
Realistic perspective is critical to achieving lifelike quality in your matte paintings. In this lesson, Maxx will teach you all the fundamentals of one, two, and three-point perspective and what the differences are between them. From there, you’ll learn how to prepare an image plate with perspective grids, break up source images into orthographic views, and retrofit them into your paintings with the proper perspective.

Lesson 4
Lighting
When creating matte paintings, you’ll often be asked to completely change the lighting of a scene. While this may seem like a daunting task, Maxx will show you his techniques to do so with relative ease. Using the cityscape created in the previous lesson, you’ll learn to do what’s called a “day for night,” where you’ll study the principles of primary and secondar