Colour charts – finished matte painting!

After my procrastination post yesterday morning, I decided to spend the day creating a matte painting for a contest I wanted to enter.

By Benita Kvinlaug. All rights reserved.

A few days ago now, I’d watched a Lynda.com tutorial by Daniel Lieske, on how to create a digital matte painting in Photoshop. I knew I wanted to work with the design above, but I was very lost on how to decide on the colour palette. I wanted to use the contrast of blue and orange, with the side contrast of purple and yellow. However, each time I’ve tried to colour this design, the image ends up looking far too saturated.

The obvious solution is to de-saturate my colours, but whenever I tried this, my image would look dull and almost monochromatic. After searching youtube for a bit, the tutorial below showed up in my recommendations:

The tutor, Sycra Yasin, gave a lot of freebies from his website, including a free trial of his Photoshop colour wheel plugin, Coolorus (which by the way, is absolutely worth getting!). This tutorial was an eye-opener,  and provided me with a much deeper understanding of colour theory.

So, I used Yasin’s colour wheel and tips to put together my colour palette. It took a couple of tries to get it right, but I’m very happy with it now.

Colour wheel and tear template can be downloaded for free at Sycra.net.

 (Colour chart above:) The idea of the tear drop, is that it creates a restricting mask over the area of the colour wheel. In order for your colours to collaborate, you need to only use these colours. Theoretically, you can give 100 per cent saturation of your main colour (blue, in my case), and 25 per cent saturation of its complimentary colour. The closer a colour is to your main colour, the more saturation you can give to it. In example, purple might get 75-80 per cent.

The only colour I cheated a bit on was the bright yellow, which I actually gave quite a high saturation. I felt this was necessary to light my design.

Final painting

I began by painting random colours onto a background layer. I then used the lasso tool to create basic shapes, copy-pasted them into new layers, and used the burn and dodge tools to give a basic indication of a light source.

I made some few adjustments to one of Photoshop’s stock brushes, and painted in the background layers using my new colour palette.

Repeated the same for the other layers.

A somewhat finished painting, but I felt like I needed a character in here to give an indication of scale.

Character added to the screen left area to give an indication of scale.

Colour test: I tried increasing the brightness and contrast, but didn’t like the high saturation of blues that this created.

I tried changing the exposure. I liked how this looked, but it didn’t communicate the idea of a dark forest…

Thus, I went back to the original image and played around with the light some more.

I used the curve window to alter the levels.

I sent some samples to a friend, got some feedback, and made the shaded area a bit darker.

Final image.

That’s it! I sent in my submission, I learned a lot of stuff, and I crossed something off from my list!