I am quite proud of this one but to tell you the truth I feel this was just more along photomanipulation than Matte Painting, but I guess those two are quite similar. I painted here and there and shaded and lighted some places. Overall about 2 hours work. What can I do to improve? What is wrong with the picture? What can make it better?
You might want to make the blending less obvious. For example, the soft erasing transition of the building and trees. What I would probably do is have some vines or something growing along the building wall, maybe 2 or 3 vines. The color matching is nice for the most part, but it's dull. Try adding a bit more variation. Some darker tones would look nice here. The lighting for the most part looks decent. But here's a tip that I use for fixing lighting on anything, and I haven't seen this used anywhere but yeah. What you do is make a new layer and make it a clipping mask to what you want to fix, then you clone stamp a part with no lighting on the part with lighting on the new layer, and set it to multiply and mess w/ opacity. Thats the basic idea, it usually will kill of the lighting on whatever it is and make it neutral, then you can add manual lighting through linear dodge or screen layer modes later on. Matte paintings are also usually done in landscape format, it's just a lot more pleasing. But this isn't bad either, just not too common. You might also want to cut things out a little better. Remember to be patient when cutting things out whatever your method is, I use the pen tool for things with complex backgrounds, and I use extract filter for things that are on solid colored backgrounds. It's pretty good for a first man, but yeah there isn't much you could really paint so it's a bit more photomanipulation. But it's a good start. Good job.
Ok I will defiantly add some vines. And also I will defiantly go over and shade alot of places and fix some things up, thanks.
