This is a photo composite matte painting created for CGTalk’s Matte Painting Challenge, Natural History Museum. The objective was to take the supplied image plate and develop it into a fantasy landscape centuries from now in which nature has completely taken over.

There were three main stages to complete: The removal of all people and signs from the original plate, the extension of the original plate by 50%, and the reconstruction of the final matte painting.

All of the submissions were spectacular and highly original, many being truly breathtaking. This project was not only highly stimulating, but also very creatively challenging.

Below you can see a scaled down progression of the image creation (there were originally over 30 iterations).

Although most of the submissions were created through digital brush painting in Photoshop, I produced mine through photo composite painting instead. This means that there is virtually no brush painting involved. Instead, every element has been individually selected, distorted, color-corrected, and treated from about 150 different photographs to make up the final composite.

There is no 3D involved in this project and it was created 100% entirely within Photoshop. The composite took approximately 4 weeks to complete, working on it occasionally. The final composite image consisted of 142 Photoshop layers at a working resolution of 4K.