Mountain Cathedral

For this round's matte painting, I took a slightly different approach with the piece. In the Haven City matte painting, I had a rough value setup below the photos, and searched for pieces of the painting. In this piece, I found photos that worked with the idea of the piece, after having browsed through various saved pins on Pinterest, and threw them onto the canvas to see what I could do with them. 

The idea came to me after looking at saved pins of mountains before I thought about a What If scenario, of a cathedral up in the mountains, instead of a temple, which seemed pretty common in movies. 

Once I figured out placement, I began sketching in between, over and connecting the photos. 

None of the photos are mine so I can't take any credit for taking the photos. Unfortunately, I don't know who to credit for them either. 

Once the sketch lines were placed in, and I got a general idea of the piece, I started painting to fill in the gaps, before moving onto the cathedral. 

... then working on the bridge, hiker (which I also gathered photos for, though from Google). 

Obviously, without changing the hiker's details and pose, it would be a direct copy paste, which I wanted to avoid, for plagiarizing and taking other people's art (painting and photography). 

What you see above though, is not the original hiker image, since I already started changing details at this stage. 

Haven City & Harbor

Haven City & Harbor - matte painting

Matte paint  after adjustments 

after getting those details in, I started painting without the sketch lines and started working on shapes and smaller details

Brainstorming up comps and Haven Tower's details 

More tower details design sketches

Initial sketch before the tower details design sketch.

Initial rough value painting before tower details design sketch

Matte paint part 1 - (Really, more of a matte images paste and transform "spit" than "paint") 

Here the tower is the initial design 

Matte paint part  2 - The tower reflects the new design.

I realized in between the sketch and rough value painting, that the tower was rather lackluster with the city. Especially since the tower would be home to the comic's heroes and main character, it wasn't eye catching with the city. Because of that, I decided to sketch up more details and designs to see if I could think up some unique shapes while introducing some magic like elements.

The city, as well as the world so far, is part tech and part magic, so the initial tower wasn't enough magic. I then thought about floating protective pieces for the tower. After all, heroes usually get attacked by their enemies, right? It's what keeps stories interesting, conflict.
The protective pieces really let me include in magical elements while also keeping it somewhat techlike too. The idea was while these pieces also protect, the inner layer is also a tech based security system.

Going forward, I really need to let myself really design out the environment before I sketch and matte paint. Another note I need to tell myself is my sketch lines need to be a darker color so I can see it over the images I'm going to use to matte paint. I found myself having to toggle the textures and images a few times so I could see where city buildings would start and end on their edges.