err'body matte paint

Someone asked me what a typical workday is like, so hopefully this is an interesting post. I get to work on a really wide range of stuff so there's no short answer.

I work on whatever they throw at us, and in this case, it was matte painting. I didn't particularly like doing matte painting, but it was a learning experience at least, and it never hurts to have another thing in your skillset. It's more photoshop trickery than illustration, but I sure honed my stamp brush skills.

So, it begins with this commercial for Home Depot and Nascar. Pretty standard feel good whatever.

Get it? FANS.

That last 7 seconds when the two people are looking at the ENDLESS HALL OF FANS really looked something like this though

The people were going to be composited in later, so I just had to make it extend 5 times further back in space, fill the shelves with products, lower the ceiling, fix the lights, repaint the floor, add an endcap, and whatever else would make it believable. So we end up with this.

Now, since the people and "Fans" sign aren't even showing, you can see some of the areas I kinda dismissed (check out the extra row of reflected lights, yeeeah). The hardest part was the shelves, as Home Depot doesn't really have a standard way of shelving anything, and having a really limited amount of product photography to work with didn't help. 

Here's everything kinda fake comped together

During this project, we'd have daily meetings where I'd meet with the art director, producers, and inferno artist and we'd nitpick the crap out of this thing until it felt believable. Commercial projects are pretty fast, and it's rare that I spend longer than a week or two on one.

Now that they've figured out that they can use me to do matte painting, I've been painting mountains for a beer ad all week. But, that's been a bit more fun.

Actual art stuffs soon :)