Pixellation Station

A matte painting, photography, and concept art blog by Joel Bewley. Contact Info: [email protected]

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These are a couple of concept paintings I did for a competition over at ArtStation. Time permitting, one of these will be made into a proper production-level matte-painting.

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I flew from Burbank CA into Salt Lake City UT in December of 2016. I had a window seat, a Nikon D750, and clear skies. These are a few of the photos I took during the flight. 

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I have been taking reference photos for many years, and have amassed a nice little library of images from the many places I have been lucky and curious enough to visit. Occasionally I’ll come across an image time and again that catches my eye and gives me pause. This happened tonight while I was working on a concept piece, and instead of finding the proper reference I needed to continue my painting I decided to develop this image instead. I would love to see this printed large-scale.

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Here is a quick little concept piece I made. There are some fun ideas here worth expanding upon, but I ran out of time (as is so often the case, with concept work!). I think I will come back in and do some clean-up later.

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I ended up building some geometry for the foreground and middle ground. I also put some cubes on top as place-holders for things to come...This is still a work in progress. 

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This is an image I put together based off of some shots I took at Red Rock State Park. I did a little camera motion test on this using cards, but it didn’t work that well with the shot. I think if I were to do some camera projection on some basic geometry for the foreground and middle ground it could be successful. Camera projection is awesome, by the way. Like, totes.                          

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This is a quick breakdown of the image above. The base plate photos are my own, taken at Red Rock State Park in California. 

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Wire removal, power line clean-up, and sky replacement are tedious but necessary skills to have in the world of matte painting and compositing.

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Here is a simple breakdown video of the layers I used to get to the final image of “Pink’s”. Original photo is my own.

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Here is a breakdown video showing the layers of the image, from the plate which I photographed to the final image. I had an entry-level DSLR at the time, so the resolution of the plate isn’t that great; I was fortunate to be able to get such a spectacular sunset from that perspective at just that moment, though. The color is so beautiful, I have revisited the photo several times over the past couple of years.

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Here is an image I put together today using After Effects and Element 3D, with some clean-up in Photoshop. The background plate is based off a picture I took in Japan many years ago. 

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This is a quick concept piece I bashed together.

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I went back to the old Building Crater from a few months ago and changed a few things. The lighting wasn't quite right, and the collapsed I-beams didn't make a lot of sense. I have started to build some geometry in Maya and get a little camera motion. 

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This is a shot break-down which will later be put into my demo reel. I started with a picture I took in Japan, did a paint-over in Photoshop, made simple geometry in Maya and projected the matte painting onto it, animated a camera, then did the final compositing and color correction in After Effects.

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Here are some process images for a 3D matte painting I am working on.

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Ship courtesy of Tu Bui; concept, lighting, colors, and textures are my own. 

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Ship courtesy of Tu Bui; concept, lighting, colors, and textures are my own.