[Petri.J]

I thought of practicing some oil painting, and now I think I like oils more than digital :D
I do realize that some things are easier to make using digital paint, but I'm going to give these oils a fighting chance. Let's see how far I can go with these. Any comments on the subject is welcome. :P

Cheers, Petri J

(sorry about the bad image quality)

[gfilmman]

Hallelujah! Finally, another like-minded painting advocate who wants to use it in a 'digital age' even though it might not always be easier for fulfilling change requests.

[Petri.J]

Originally Posted by gfilmman

Hallelujah! Finally, another like-minded painting advocate who wants to use it in a 'digital age' even though it might not always be easier for fulfilling change requests.

Hehe :D
Well it's not too hard to do change requests just erase and re-do, right? :)

I would like to do a fully finished piece, but it would have to be huge! This one is only A2 but if you are going to make more detail, it would have to be more around A1 or something. The problem is that those big canvases are quite expensive :/

[gfilmman]

:) I agree with you regarding ease of making changes in oil. But, the argument I've heard is that it's difficult to make changes, in the sense you can't shift things around on the fly, if a supervisor comes back with feedback after you think you've got your final version completed, and asks you to move the building, cloud or whatever you've painted to finish level. In which case, my response is okay, I'll composite the painted elements digitally just so a total repaint is not required just for a compositional placement change.

Anyway, I love your attitude that one can make changes easily, by redoing it. If you communicate well and get approval on early concepts than I can still see a finished matte painting done with real paint being perfectly plausible, especially if you are working freelance and can decide how you want to work.

Good work on your first sketch. I think you could get adequate detail painting at 2 ft by 4ft, or even 1ft by 2ft. You just have to keep in mind good matte painting is photo impressionistic, you don't need to paint every leaf, or every branch, or stone, just imply some details.
Good supports for this kind of matte work include glass, masonite, acrylic sheet, plexiglass and lexan. Canvas is not generally used due to the texture, but if you sand it smooth enough you could probably get away with it.

Looking forward to seeing more if you keep at it.

[Petri.J]

Work in progress. This one is a huge oil painting! 120x45 cm. I cropped the sky off because it didn't work, but I kind of like the size now that there isn't so much sky.

I guess I should make the horizon disappear more in to the atmosphere because now it kind of seems too flat and too green.

[gfilmman]

Good start Petri, quite moody. It's not entirely clear what you're going for in subject matter, to me it looks like an ocean and cliffs. A moving ocean, up close, would not typically be painted.

What you do with the horizon line depends on how far away you want it to appear and how much atmospheric depth/perspective you want to achieve. So, first you need to determine how close that horizon is, what the lighting condition is going to be as well through your sky, and go from there. The sky is very important.

[Petri.J]

Thank you for your reply.
Seems like the picture is not very clear because there is no ocean in the painting. What there should be is a landscape of lava rock. Hot steam is coming out from the ground and the "horizon" you can see is a hill that is closer that that mountain. Behind the hill there are clouds that collide with the mountain and some of them climb over it.
That's what it should look like. I guess I shouldn't quit my day job :D

[gfilmman]

haha, Don't worry, many paintings start out looking like abstract foggy things that you have to refine and bring the image out of the fog.

Are you using reference photographs? You'll need to have a lighting plan and refine form to make it read as whatever you intend it to read as.