Sail city | walkthrough

We all get inspired by everything around us, be it a picture, a movie or a book. When I found the first pictures of the Milwaukee Art Museum, I was simply astonished by the beautiful design and the originality of the building. The man behind the design of this great structure is Santiago Calatrava Valls, an internationally recognized and award-winning architect, sculptor and structural engineer. On the side you can see some pictures of the building.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wscottheath/191944574/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/puroticorico/2074675805/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/indigotimbre/979971584/

For a while now I wanted to create a beautiful futuristic city and this was just the right occasion. I wanted to work on a vertical format, because in matte painting I mainly use landscape and I wanted to do something different in this personal piece. The goal was creating something believable, an optimistic foreseeable future.

While browsing the web photo galleries one of them caught my eye. This one had a very good potential for doing an illustration starting from a given plate. I found the great shot on flickr, from kke227.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kesta/1818976244/

So I took the image into Photoshop, created a new document in standard A3 print size and placed the base image. Next I started to sketch out the composition. Because I wanted grand scale, I chose to go with some sort of towers growing out of this city wall. I was trying to get my focus points right, so that the viewers eye travels trough the image but it is not pushed away. The atmosphere was still undecided and I did try some dramatic lighting conditions, with storm clouds, but finally decided to go for a more realistic approach. That means I chose mid day light because this will make the image more believable.

Now this was the moment where I had to do something to make my image stand out from all the other future cities. I had the idea of the sail city for a while. I really liked the image of huge veils moving in the wind, like some sort of monuments to the ancient ships. So I used some photos of boats and started placing the veils to fit the composition. It was something to be careful with, because of the very organic shapes I wanted to achieve. You should also know that I used photos of very small boats, but as scale is something relative, as long as I imply the the sails are huge, you cannot notice.

During this process I kept in mind some of the basic principles of a matte painting : perspective, scale and depth. I used similar repetitive shapes, that get smaller as we go further away to help with the depth of the image and set up the perspective. I paid attention to the black levels and kept everything darker in the foreground while the colors got less saturated and black turned into gray in the background. Then I added the background buildings, again using stock images. I was kind of pleased with what I had so far. The concept was clear, I had a nice perspective and some nice organic shapes. But the image was very dull due to the chosen lighting and the limited color palette. So I went further with the details.

So I had to make things more interesting. Because I was working with these nice curved organic shapes, I experimented with the vividly colored ovals. I needed this sci-fi element, that would set the city apart from one of our times, while still keeping it realistic. So I went for the holographic commercials. This will also bring color to my image and also help the composition.

At this point I detailed the background, because I also wanted to have a nice clean image without the human elements I wanted to add next. So I used again the repetitive shape technique to emphasize the feeling of depth by adding another gate-bridge in the background. I removed the dark hedge from the original image and repeated the grass shapes, making sure I am following the correct perspective.

Now, I had that clean image, without any people in it, but looking good. If this would have been sued in a movie, probably this would have been the point where you give it to the compositor to add footage with walking people and all the other stuff. Instead, because I was only aiming for a still image, some photos of tourists did the job. I searched for pictures of people visiting popular tourist attractions that had similar perspective and light conditions as my image. I started placing them around the frame, making sure I don't ruin the scale and perspective of the image. Another important aspect is the consistency of the shadows. One could easily get carried away duplicating and flipping people, and by doing so adding shadows from multiple suns. Things like this really ruin an image, because most of the times the viewer won't say ah, the shadows are wrong , but just feel that something is not right in the image and destroy the believability.

Then I started adding more banners and ads around the place to make the whole thing more like a living place. I chose different colors to give the palette more diversity. I was very careful not to end up with a monochromatic image. So all the small details mattered. The small trains are colored, the banners, the people, the holograms just to give it that natural diversity. For the lower windows on the left structure I added a picture of times square set to overlay mode to simulate refraction of the interior through the glass.

It was a bit of a struggle choosing the right sky for the image. As you can see in the previous steps there were a few versions ( and a lot more which you haven't seen ). I was trying to get the right balance in the image and the sky played an important part. I wanted to give the eye some place to rest, because the image was crowded and detailed at the bottom, but not a simple blue gradient. So I chose to add that cloud formation, which seemed the right choice.

The very last thing was cleaning up any artifacts I missed while working on the image, some final color adjustments and it was ready. I saved the image in a few different sizes and sharpened them accordingly. This is one aspect I am very careful with, the way the image looks when resized. Then I leave it for a few days, and if after that it looks right I can call this done.


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