Dubrovnik Matte Painting
Scroll down for added process pics

Winner of a CGTalk.com Choice Award - please feel free to click the award below to see the thread. It was also was asked to be published in a
Feature article, 'The Best of Fantasy Art' in the French Computer Arts Magazine. It was also featured in Expose 3, winning an Excellence award
in the 2D Environment Category.

Original photos taken by myself at the Isle of Capri, Italy and Dubrovnik, Croatia

The red on the right is a mask I painted to take out the trees from the background.

Below is the first rough composite. Being happy with the general composition, I began the fun...

So now the boats and houses are gone...and a castle has began to take shape. Right now, the castle is half photo/half paint.

I had to get rid of the photo blue look of the above image, which resulted in below.

Below, I've added in a new sky and a distant mountain as well as some modifications to the terrain

Now it gets interesting. I wanted to carry over the lighting from the main island to that of the left side.
I ended up wiping the left clean and repainting in some interesting cliff shapes, and topping it off with a
village up there in the light fog. I also painted in a new sky and painted in some mountains on screen right.

A few castle adjustments, cloud revisions, and color shifts, which I decided to bring it back into a more photoreal color scheme.

Below are a few close-ups. 100% views. So you can see the brushstrokes, revisions, etc...