Textures in my final

The original pictures I used in my Final

I liked how they I ended up fitting them. The cat was the one that didnt quite come out as expressive in my final piece as she was in the original picture. She's like the neighbor's or something but I feed her sometimes and so she always busts in the back door when I open it so one day on a project break I opened the door to go outside and she busted in. I grabbed my camera and a piece of ham and went out to the porch to take some shots of her and while i was reviewing them I seen the picture and how she looked mad as shit about me photographing her when after all she was a single mother trying to get by on minimum wage or something like that. The hands I reconstructed with with copy and paste and paint. What I really like about my final project is although I have a whole bunch of junk cobbled in there it's not too cluttered theres some open space and everything is toned down into place.

My Final Project

This is what I ended up with my final project and I took charlies suggestions in editing a few things in and out and I'm pretty happy with it.

Progress Before Bed

I got some great tool shots at work and heres roughly how i want them but i do have to reposition a few of them and i might lose the table clamo and the coat rack but honestly i love the little peek of the bottom of it through the table and the blood. i was playing around with thinning the blood using a layer mask but will thicken it up a little bit more i also smoothed out the pool itself and cleaned up some layers tonight and a few other details but heres where I am going to bed. I keep flip flopping on the exact texture i want to use for the floor and walls but i have several i am deciding on choosing from but figure all of that out between now and wednesday when it comes time to print. All in all im happy with my progress so far though, I'm happy with my theme and it's something I'm really eager to nail. I'm going to bed comfortable with my project.

Minute Details

Spent all morning on small little errors in such around the gates next will be the blood probably i want to thin that out a slight bit and add somemore glow... I also added a cat drinking the blood. It's an alley cat who basically lives under/on the porch so she's back home. I kind of just have her there looking the way she was when i took the pic. I may consider wrapping her tail around her and also using liquify to see if i can enhance her expression and might use a lighter red so you can really see her blood goatee. Also if you look close she has blood stained whiskers. I redrew her whiskers on the left and they have that hyper realistic look i actually kind of love. I'm getting ready to leave home now so I wont be able to work on this again until tomorrow night. Here is where I stopped today.

Last nights progress... I got people close to how I want them

I like the abstract way the people look in here. I cut down on alot of the dust and added more highlights still got more work to do but its coming along nicely. I still want to add more tools for the table.

Working on it still

I've gotten a few more things the way I want them here the lighting I have the way I want. I Still have to do a bunch of highlights all around and Im going to try to put some hands on the bars...

The road so far on my final...

Here's what I have done so far obviously  not finished. I have to go over the pipe again with some coloring. The table I completely painted out because I couldnt find one i wanted but using a reference image i used the shape and painted the table out. The same for the blood pools i used a refence image for the colors only the water is a shot of water i took at a fountain on thursday. My people silhouettes are people sillhouttes i kind of tried to paint out a little bit but still have to work on. Im happy witht he lighting. The right and left walls arent complete. For the left wall I want to get a good texture.. well apply it i already have it im just pacing myself because i may want to get a tool rack shot from my job to throw on the wall. For the right gate I want to paint over the wood like the front one and a diffrent kind of mold. Finally after I get everything how i want it the floors going to be dusty so the splotches will be little dust clouds from the stirring in the gates .

Inspiration for my final piece...

The inspiration for my game idea turned matte painting came from my all time favorite movie. The people under the stairs. The movie came out in about 91 and I was 6 and my parents let me see pretty much any movie I wanted to see and this was one of them. What caught me most as a kid was the fact that it was a kid in this crazy position so I could identify with that or whatever. But growing up it became more of the idea of the nightmares next door that they're possibly in there hiding and how they'd kill you to keep the secret. So basically it was this twisted couple who kept people locked in the basement. This kid breaks in and gets stuck alone and finds out about all of the madness to fight his way out. Only he decides to help out the kids trapped in the house as well. Why I think it would be a good game because you have to break in the house and then break out of the house and then he breaks back in the house. The walls were filled with mazes and all these custom made contraptions throughout the house and this nasty dog. Very suspenseful oppurtunies to lurk through a long dust filled corridor seeing the beam of the crazy man (who wore a crazy ass leather suit with a zipper for the mouth) attached to his shotgun. What I loved about them is they were a hand carved crazy to me, and what I mean by hand carved is that they were so meticulously insane that I could never get enough. It was the fact that they were doing these crazy things and had this crazy way of looking at life and people and believed they were right the whole time. I felt like I haven't seen a character as diabolical as the man and woman (who remain unnamed but call each other mommy and daddy). Anyway if you have I seen it I suggest you watch it. Think about it along the lines of turning it into a game. Back to my matte final, after going on and on about that having set the tone for my project. I wanted to catch a glimpse of what you would see on your way down the steps into this basement for the first time. It was the workroom for all the madness, this was there they stuck all the kidnapped children to live in filth for doing something they've deemed inappropriate. I want to recreate that dark makeshift prison housing the dozens of people who've been maimed and turned cannibal under the stairs. For my scene I'm using a base picture of if you've been listening, a shot under my stairs. The way the porch is built it looks like wooden bars coming fitting right into my idea. For the workroom I plan on taking some pictures at work that I can use for my scene to show a break in some horrid act. For my brushes I want to go with some dusty moldy textures all about because with the the just sheer horror in atmosphere (blood+feces+urine, etc) there's going to be mold all over the place and deep. Also a red blood texture for the tools and table and the floor. Also a good wooden texture for the walls. I want the air to be thick with dust and im really hoping to nail the shotty light that really accentuates the variations of dust for the restlessness within the makeshift prison. I've already started working on how I want to have it laid out and I'm actually hoping to be ready to just spend just all next week alone. So basically summing up this whole crazy idea of mine in a mood I'm hoping for chilling. I am all about horror but in a truly suspenseful way. I want you to be afraid that you want to know whats going on in the scene. I'm extremely excited about this project and am hoping to have my composition together no later than sunday night so next week is all paint. 

Clean the plate Night Scene

For this assignment we had to remove the people from a picture and turn it into a night scene. For that I used the spot healing brush and the clone stamp to get them out. Then for the night look I used levels, curves and color balance adjustment layers to achieve the night look. I used a gaussian blur on white brush strokes to get highlights and the same with a dull blue to bring out some of the lowlights.

Rainforest Matte Painting Demo Step 1: Cleaning The Plate / Levels

To begin our demo we had to remove the lady and the sign to give us an image to work with. After she was removed with the spot healing brush the levels and color balance were adjusted to enhance the color and change the time of day.

Outer Space

For this project we had to do a space scene based off of our class demo. The first one was the in class demo and the 2nd one is my take home version. I duplicated several of the intial techniques but put a different spin on it. I wanted the shine to be intense and I believe I got that effect.

Matte Painting #2 The Cathedral

For this assignment we were given the challenge of adding all of these other pictures to the cathedral image as well as a set of brushes that were mostly grassy and mossy in nature. So I got the idea that I didnt want anything destroyed but over grown like in a state of just growth.

Matte Painting #1

On this assignment I had a lot of fun working on mostly everything. After I was just about finished I wanted to put this sort of faux TV frame around it to sort contain the action visually. All in all I'm pretty happy with my end result.

Matte Painting 2: Adding FX

For this assignment we are adding meteors crashing down on the city. We began with smoke trails in class and a breaking the building demo and were to break a couple more and leave a hole in the blue building as well as shattering glass from all of the madness.

Matte Painting Exercise Step 1: Combine the 3 photos.

The last image is a combination of the 3 images.

Side Project

Using some of the techniques I learned in class and the custom brushes I turned myself into a zombie in anticpation for The Walking Dead season finale.

Blending Colors

For this exercise we had to blend two colors together. Mines were the blends on the right for the rectangle and the sphere.

Texturing

For this assignment we had to understand the texturing process with a wall. There is a diffused map, a spectral map, normal map and I added a painted version of the wall as well.

Texture assignment

For this assignment I chose 5 textures to pattern a brush with skin in mind. I demonstrated each of the 5 in the following pictures.

5 adjustment layers, 5 blending modes, 2-3 layer styles

The first 6 were the images and the final one was my completed project. We had to have 5 adjustment layers and 5 blending modes and 2-3 layer effects.

Quick Masking

For this one I saw a picture of a forest I liked and well I wanted to challenge myself with this project and I decided to cut the trees up into 5 sections as per our project criteria.