Drawing for Games

Drawing For Games

Will Roberts

                        Research, Development and Evaluation Document

For the next part of my project I want to delve into a bit of matte painting. It's something I've been interested in learning for a while and recently started producing some work using matte painting techniques. Matte painting is used in both the film and games industry so I figured it would be a useful skill to learn, especially as some company's require matte painting skills.

Matte painting consists of manipulating many images to create an image. It is used heavily in film to create backgrounds, composites, and set extensions. Matte painting is used heavily in the Avatar and the Lord of the Rings films.

Matte painting originated in 1905 by a man called Norman Dawn. He developed a technique that joined together a photograph and a painting to enhance the environment that is being shot on the camera. Dawn took would take a large piece of glass, black tape was then placed over the parts of the camera where the painting would go. The result was a union between a simple painting and actual live scenery.

http://psd.tutsplus.com/articles/theory/the-history-of-matte-painting-basix/

http://psd.tutsplus.com/articles/theory/the-history-of-matte-painting-basix/

Painting of Matte used in Star Wars.

This style of art has been adopted by many artists who don’t necessarily create these paintings for use in movies, it has become a signature style of some designers who prefer making these types of illustrations.

Matte painting techniques are used in the concept art for games, and the concept for films because using photo elements in the artwork speeds up the whole process for finding ideas and producing artwork more quickly and efficiently, Because in the entertainment industry there is constantly a deadline for projects, so time management is crucial.

Artists:

Dylan Cole

http://www.dylancolestudio.com/

Dylan Cole is a matte painter that specializes in the film and games industry. He attended UCLA as a fine art major where he developed his drawing and painting skills.A summer internship at ILM is where Dylan discovered the digital world that he had been avoiding. Within a year and a half of graduating from UCLA Dylan was off to New Zealand to be a senior matte painter for Lord of the Rings. Since then he has contributed art in over 50 films.

Dylan runs several workshops at various events and schools around the world and has many instructional DVD's from the Gnomon Workshop which I have recently bought. The information provided in his DVD's was extremely useful, so I'm going to implement these techniques into the artwork I create for this unit.

I found out about Dylan when I saw a lot of his concept art for Avatar which I found really inspiring. In the concepts he started painting the base in trying to find the composition and colours and once that was established he would then layer the photo elements on top and this style of painting and the effect it creates is something I want to try and achieve in my paintings.

http://www.dylancolestudio.com/

Here is an example of concept art created for Avatar.

David Luong

David is a senior cinematic artist at Blizzard Entertainment and has been working in the visual effects industry for nearly 8 years. He currently does lighting, compositing, and matte painting for blizzards cinematics on games such as Diablo 3, starcraft 2 and World of Warcraft.

David also has several workshops  explaining his techniques, but unlike Dylan, David does classes online which cover many topics and last for around 8 weeks, where he can also have live Q + A's with the people that participate. 

Here are some of the mattes from some of the cinematics in Diablo 3.

Although I'm not looking to get into cinematics I still find it interesting how one style of painting can be used in so many ways so I think learning it would be really useful if I'm looking to get into the industry.

Simon Scales

http://fish032.deviantart.com/

Simon is a concept artist and matte painter working in the Games industry. He is also an instructor for CGSociety’s 8 week online workshops. Prior to working in video games Simon worked as a children’s book illustrator for 10 years. In 2008 he attended the concept design academy in Pasadena, California where he learnt from some of the best concept artists in the industry. Simon is currently the director and instructor at CDW Studios, a private school for visual effects all over Australia  and New Zealand and brought out some of the best artists in the world to Australia to instruct and give demonstrations to students. 







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