Matte painting digital art — or how Moses parted the sea and triggered a massive wave that hit London 🙂
These are my very first matte painting digital art pieces — Moses parting the sea and flooding London’s Tower Bridge, an apocalyptic city, an ancient fantasy town, and a book of fairytales. Even though these artworks do not exactly represent the commercial value of my client work, they were the stepping stones. They led me deeper into digital artwork and expressing complex creative ideas in a painting.
Let’s honour those first timid steps into the pathway of professional destiny. Let’s show where it all started — and the distance that had to be mastered to get here.
Matte painting digital art — four early works
‘Moses splits the sea’ is a matte painting digital art piece I built in 2014. Moses is me with a rope and a stick. 🙂 I added the rest of the artwork digitally via Photoshop retouching. I hand-picked all the source images and manually cut them out to recompose them into this supernatural environment. There is a video on YouTube showing the creation process in time lapse. Furthermore, this artwork got pretty popular on the internet. It even made it into living rooms and onto book covers — with or without me knowing. As Austin Kleon says in Steal Like an Artist: if people copy your work, your work is not so bad after all. 🙂
‘Apocalypse London’ I created in 2012 during a class while studying communication design in Berlin. It was one of those moments. You realise: “This is freaking cool — I think I found my profession.”
‘Ancient town’. Many long hours went into this one in 2013. Finding all the little details in the footage, telling the story of a fantasy town on massive rocks, framed with an ancient tree that helps the viewer focus on the city. I also discovered the advantages of colour looks and gradients here. I published this artwork twice — in Practical Photoshop and digitalPhoto Photoshop in 2013 and 2017. An astounding honour.
‘Book of fairytales’ from 2012 has not appeared anywhere — however, I just love it so much! 🙂
See also our Lake of Dreams matte painting and our Sailor in a Light Bulb CGI artwork — more work from the same era. If you want to understand where handmade digital art sits today, our piece on why AI visuals weaken your brand is worth reading.
