Matte Painting is the art of creating scenes for film or video that would otherwise be too expensive to build as a set or would indeed be outright impossible, (panoramic historical, science fiction and surreal scenes). A matte painting can be as simple as adding snow to an existing shot, changing a scene from day to night, extending existing sets, or it can be an extremely complex, multi-planed, full frame matte painting.

The goal of the matte artist is to create a scene that looks as realistic as it would have had the scene actually existed and been captured on film. If the artist is successful the work isn't even noticed. Hence, a website like this one!

Mattes used to be done by painting onto glass and then were photographically composited together with filmed elements. The first Star Wars is a good example of this technique. Today matte paintings are done digitally in a computer paint program and then composited with live action elements in any number of different programs and platforms. The digital process allows a much broader range of realistic manipulation. (Atmosphere, smoke, moving clouds, CG water, ad infinitum!)

All the matte painting on this site were painted on a Mac G4 or G5 computer using Adobe Photoshop and a Wacom graphics tablet.