Eagle's Peak

Hi all!

Today, my first attempt at matte painting ever. At that it kinda failed, as it's not very realistic itself, but as an artwork I definitely am still quite fond of it.

I also wanted to add some storytelling elements to it. "Just a landscape" isn't inherently wrong of course, but I like to have something else in my work that may catch viewer's attention, to let them know that something's going on more than just a pretty shot.

Here are a couple close-ups with the details:

For a plain matte painting, the base idea was maybe misguided, as the greatest matte paintings come from using photos that already conform to the light setting in one's environment.
Me, I just like to make it the hardest haha... To quickly show what I mean, instead of using photos with the lighting I wanted, I did the complete opposite, so I changed the whole original scene to a sunset setting:

Granted that doing this taught me a lot about how to change an image's lighting either way, so maybe it wasn't a bad thing after all.

This was also my first ever Daily Deviation on DeviantArt. This also was when Daily Deviations were relevant, so it gave my account a big boost. :D
Literally the reason I am still doing art today, and that I once thought I might make a living out of this craft.

Still, this was before I ever made a process animation, so while I have the process, it's a bit different this time.

I realize that this is a bit hard to see here on Hive, so if you want you can give it a look directly on DeviantArt: https://www.deviantart.com/rowye/art/Eagle-s-Peak-PROCESS-567376953
(click on the image to go fullscreen, then click on it again for full size view)