This is a good wrote because it compares mediums oil and acrylic, it's like comparing traditional and digital matte painting they say some artists like to combine the two paints, that makes me like one of those artists combining traditional and digital matte painting in my end piece of practical work. Also it's the only quote I've seen that discuss the initial stages of planning a matte painting. It's interesting that this is never discussed maybe because people just jump straight into it. I really must plan mine because I'm so scatty I'd probably forget an important detail.
“The artist begins by deciding which parts of an image should be live action and which should be painted. The human eye tends to scan images in a uniform way most of us read an image from left to right. Some people believe that our eyes also move up towards the top of an image in a triangular motion during this left-to-right scan . ‘This is what I call the “pyramid of believability”,’ says Evans. [Chris Evans senior artist at Matte World Digital] “If a viewer’s eyes scans these three broad areas of an image and reads them as real, then he or she will probably accept the whole image as genuine. These are the parts of an image that we tend to reserve for the live-action portion of a shot. We also consider the fact that the eye is always drawn to the lightest areas of an image. The live action therefore tends to be situated in the brightest regions of a composition, while the painted areas tend to be darker and more shadowy.”
Once an image has been planned, the matte artist begins to produce the painting. If a painting is to be done on glass a wash of white or grey base paint is applied to the surface, over which the coloured paint is added. There is some difference of opinion about whether oil paints or acrylic are the better material for matte painting. Oil paints dry slowly which allows the artist to push them around and alter them for some time after they have been applied. The rich colours of oil paints do not alter when they are dry, which is useful when a painting has to match live action footage. Acrylics on the other hand, dry in a matter of minutes and can be painted over almost immediately. However acrylics do tend to dry a slightly different colour. Some artists like to combine the two mediums, developing and perfecting a design in acrylic and then laying oil paints over the top to create the final image.
Matte paintings can sometimes be a combination of original artwork and other materials. ‘The purpose of a matte painting is to tell a story without the deception being discovered,’ says Harrison Ellenshaw. . . ‘The method you use to create that image is really not important. If you are trying to create an image of something that already exists, then you might as well make use of that object or location by photographing it and adding the photo to your painting. I used this method for matte paintings of the Jawa’s sand crawler in Star Wars and Boba Fett’s spaceship in the Empire Strikes Back. We had models of these machines, so I lit them appropriately and photographed them from the correct angle. I then stuck the photographs on glass, painted onto of them add the correct environment around them.’ pg 196/197 Rickett, R. (2004)
If something is not quite perfect in a matte painting they will rarely think “That’s a bad matte shot”, but they will sense that there’s something not quite right about what they are seeing. That can pull them out of the narrative very quickly. pg 197 Chris Evans. Rickett, R. (2004)This is a good quote for the section of the essay that will relate to the theory of immersion.
The quotes below all tie matte painting into the impressionistic style which is so important it gets large coverage in my dissertation:
The effectiveness of a matte painting also stems from the way in which paint is applied to the surface. For paintings to combine seamlessly with photographed images, a style of painting is required that is photo-realistic when filmed. From around 2m 6ft away, most good matte paintings do look like photographs. Closer inspection usually reveals an impressionistic style of painting in which the artist has stabbed rough areas of colour with surprisingly little intricate detail. ‘Creating matte paintings is actually a case of painting something that mimics the way our eyes perceive a scene,’ explains Harrison Ellenshaw. ‘If we look into the distance, we don’t actually see very much detail at all. A window on a far-off building looks just like a small grey smudge, a tree looks like a dull green blob, perhaps with a bit of brown in it. What makes these distant objects look like windows or trees is the fact that our brains see them in context and tell us what they are - our brains fill in the fine details that our eyes don’t actually perceive. If you were to create a matte painting in which every little detail was visible, you might think that it would look incredibly realistic. In fact, it would look like the most fake image that you have ever seen. Matte paintings are therefore impressionistic in style. They are made up of lots of little blobs and lines of colour that look pretty non descriptor up close, but when you step back they look very natural.’ pg 198 Rickett, R. (2004)This is a long winded but strong explanation, I think that this would have to be paraphrased because it's so long. / Trimmed down.
“Lou was humming around, picked up a brush and added a little white, dabbed on some dots, smeared it a little and said, ‘Shoot it.’ And it looked dead real on film!" Cotta Vaz, M and Barron, C (2004).You can't fake that kind of passion in the way these sentences are crafted, it's pure magic.
I remember once we were looking out a window to a beige-coloured [soundstage] with pebbly stucco. The sun was hitting it pretty strong. Henry goes, ‘What do you see there?’ I said, ‘Is this a trick question? It’s a stucco wall, beige colour.’ But there was more He said, ‘The sun is constantly moving and each of those little pebbly grains is throwing a shadow. It looks stationary, but it’s moving. There’s life there.’ It became clear to me. The sun, raking across and throwing different shadows, creates a rippling effect. That’s what gives life, that’s your impressionistic style.’ Cotta Vaz, M and Barron, C (2004)This last quote is more regarding lighting back to the impressionistic style, I think I've already got a lot to cover in the painting chapter so I think I'll leave this out, but this quote made me think more about the lighting which is one of the reasons I have also investigated different lighting techniques in painting.
‘When creating a matte painting, I use all sorts of painting techniques,’ notes Chris Evans. ‘If you look at a real building or a mountain, there are layers of history and weathering and decay. All those nuances of surface texture need to be suggested in a painting. I often lay on colours in broad strokes and then push them around and stipple them with a rag or newspaper. However, an important aspect of matte painting is destroying any sense of there being a painted surface,’ he cautions ‘Modern artists like Jackson Pollock and impressionists like Claude Monet draw attention to the surface of the canvas through their painting techniques. We have to make sure there’s absolutely no surface on matte paintings - they need to be more like windows opening out onto a view o part of the painting should catch the light in a way that indicates a surface. Some matte painters have even been known to sand down each layer of paint so that it is totally smooth before applying the next layer, as if making a lacquer box.’ Rickett, R. (2004)
The quote above explains why the impressionistic style isn't completely used, and why it's a combination of realism and impressionism.
No matter how well crafted, a matte painting can only ever be a still image - a moment in time that has been captured like a photograph. Even on a windless day, a real scene is never static - grass and trees always sway, clouds drift, heatwaves distort the distant view. Matte paintings can look artificial without these almost imperceptible movements. ‘There are many ways to bring a little life to an otherwise still painting when it is being filmed,’ explains Harrison Ellenshaw. ‘Perhaps the most popular and versatile method is to scrape small areas of paint off the glass go a matte painting. During filming any moving object or light source can be placed behind the painting. Where the changing light pattern is seen through the glass, the scene will appear to have some movement. A small change in light can make painted grass look as if it is swaying or water look as if it is flowing.’ The same trick was used by Ellenshaw to make the stars sparkle above Tracey Town in Dick Tracey (1990). pg 199/200 Rickett, R. (2004)
This movement is like what I was on about in the case study with the need for live action being twenty percent, maybe I need to revisit this section with this quote, and the quote about the three elements of movement?. ****
Day’s greatest gift was sharing his knowledge of painting, often transmitted in catchphrases that would be handed down in the line of matte painters. “Day taught me that you’ve got to understand perspective, that the essential thing to remember is the basics,” Ellenshaw explained. “Pop also used to say, ‘Don’t be afraid of it.’ It’s just a painting! Avoid the feeling that what you’ve done is a happy accident and you’ll never be able to do it again. Another one of Pop’s saying was, ‘Use a big brush.’ I used to use big house brushes and towels. On a big painting you’ve got to keep it moving, got to use a big brush. ‘Don’t get tickily with it,’ he used to say.” pg 69 Cotta Vaz, M and Barron, C (2004)
I think this quote will be perfect for my synthesis chapter, because even though I've looked at perspective and lighting I don't think I'll have enough room in my dissertation to academically write about them and I think it will bore people, so I can briefly cover why I've gone back to basics to make the best of my work.
Yurich brought to his work the “big brush” style favoured since the heyday of Pop Day. “I could lay in a whole damn painting in a day. I’d key on the major element. If it were buildings, I’d paint one in real quick; if there was a a sky I’d get that in. Instead of working from one end and sweeping across, I’d jump from one to the other, keeping everything in community so one side wasn’t too strong of a contrasty green, the other reoccurring red or whatever. That way you were having the same feeling on one side as the other, it kept entering in.’
pg103 Cotta Vaz, M and Barron, C (2004)
I think this quote will also be useful in the synthesis chapter but I'm going to have to chop it down quite a bit, but basically the point I want to take forward is the key process in the traditional style of matte painting of the big brush and how fast it comes together.
Whitlock own instinct began guiding his creative discoveries during his Disney Studio tenure. By his own admittance, Whitlock’s early painting style was “too tight.” His breakthrough realization was that a painting didn’t need to be detailed, that it was only important how it looked on film. The revelation came to whitlock on the 1960 Disney Studio Adventure film Ten who dared, as he struggled with a painting of rocky canyon walls for a shot of a boat on a river. “People were admiring the painting and I kept putting in detail, ignoring the fact that it was a backlit shot and you wouldn’t see so much detail in the rock walls. You didn’t even see the boat, which was the whole point of the shot, because whole chunks of canyon details were four times bigger than the boat. Walt was so down on me for doing this awful shot. I got out a new glass and within an hour I had this series of silhouettes, receding shapes for the new canyon walls Hardly any details, but when photographed it looked like a million dollars. Walt was thrilled. So I learned where to put the work and to what degree.This is a good quote because it's like the opposite of the other one and explains why you can't be too realistic in your detail in a painting if it's going to be filmed.
pg 148 Cotta Vaz, M and Barron, C (2004)
“Al Whitlock taught me things mostly by osmosis. It was about being around him, seeing him. Al didn’t believe in drawing out a shot. It was about the energy of the moment when he was painting. He believed you had to come to a matte painting with focus and a certain energy.” - Syd Dutton. Whitlock Protégé and cofounder of Illusion arts. pg 157 Cotta Vaz, M and Barron, C (2004)
I just included this quote because I thought it was quite poetic and sentimental.
"Al was like a samurai painter, the moment of painting was important to him,” explained Syd Dutton, pg 158 .. Al taught me to know your brushes so well they become extensions of your mind. His technique was a balance between emotional state and cerebral state. Cotta Vaz, M and Barron, C (2004)
For Lasaine, then a fledling matte painter, the film went against the invisible nature of the art. He recalled how director and star Warren Beatty had praised an early matte painting, then pronounced it "totally wrong.” It had been too realistic. “' I want it to look like a painting, like it’s a living comic book,' Beatty told us,” Lasagne recalled. “As matte artists we were thinking this was bad. But we finally realised it was liberating. We were able to do things you could never do as a matte painter, creating stylistic colour schemes and strange skies." Cotta Vaz, M and Barron, C (2004)
This quote is to be included in my synthesis chapter, because I don't want to be completely realistic in my outcome of work I want to be like Warren Beatty's dream that way it's more unique in it's take on matte painting.
‘Hiding a matte line begins with designing a shot that makes use of “natural” matte lines,’ explains Barron. ‘We always look for divisions of colour or texture in the live-action plate that can be used as the point where live action turns into painting. Shots of cities or perhaps rocky environments are relatively simple because there are lots of distinct lines, such as the edges of walls or boulders, that can serve as boundaries. The hardest matte lines to achieve are where the live-action plate haas to end is a consistent area of colour, like the sand in the desert or a blue sky. When that happens, we have to match the colour of the photographed painting with the colour of the live action exactly.’ pg 201 Rickett, R. (2004)I think this is something to put in the conclusion the fact that the big thing digital technology has progressed and made so much easier is hiding the matte lines. I wonder if this noticeable in the old wizard of oz this might be added there?
“It’s easier for someone with a traditional arts background to figure out the digital tool set than [to] take someone who knows digital and teach them how to paint. There’s more to painting than painting. There’s a lifetime of artistic and aesthetic training.” Paul Lasagne Rickett, R. (2004)
This quote basically sums up why it's so important to look at the Realism era and the work of the Impressionists, because it's the inspiration that opens the door to a successful matte. This would be a good opener to the chapter I think.
“Lou would say, ‘It’s just values of black and white - play with it.’ He was very casual about it. Lou taught that when doing any visual effect you had to start with a vision in your mind knowing what it had to look like. Then you could do your tricks or add new tricks. And the same with painting. What he was saying was the drawing and colour [were] there, you just had to pull it together with washes of dark and light, and highlights and specks of black. Just simple things like that made something look real - the final little touches you can’t explain.” pg 250 (about lou lichtenfield) Cotta Vaz, M and Barron, C (2004)Another reason to stress the importance of looking at lighting in old masters.
Cotta Vaz, M and Barron, C (2004). The Invisible Art: The Legends of Movie Matte Painting. San Francisco: Chronicle Books LLC. 1.
The only quote below that I've found that also slightly mentions digital in the form of painting, although I do have some books on digital painting that might also provide some more quotes. Although I'm kind of concerned at how many quotes I've got now it's going to take a lot of chopping. I need to crack on string them together. Also notice another emphasis on lighting, maybe I haven't done enough research into lighting. Argh.
Developing the lighting and mood component of a painting is something a little more fluid and organic and this is really the meat in the sandwich for me. Many of my paintings, both traditional or digital, start out as mood ideas which are undefined and may float around for ages before I apply them to more concrete environments, forms or situations. The photographer in me is constantly on the lookout for interesting lighting.
The oil paintings Iʼve created so far are a part of a larger science fiction project that has been simmering for many years, eventually to be realised as a fully illustrated novel! I have come to realise my love of painting wasnʼt so much a love of matte painting, although Iʼve had my fare share of creative joy painting on films like Lord of the Rings, it was simply a love of telling stories visually.
I will be exhibiting at Illuxcon V, in November this year so if you would like to probe a little deeper or see my work in person, drop by and say hi.
Check out more of Wayne Haag's work at Ankaris.com.
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