1. I started this matte painting by creating a new document in Adobe Photoshop with a blank canvas of 3540 x 6000 pixels at 300dpi. This gave me a pretty large area to work in, with lots of room for little details. I started off by drawing in the rough outlines of my landscape. At this stage I have already started using layers, separating my background, foreground and middleground. It is a good habit to name your layers for easy reference because in a painting such as this you could end up using literally hundreds of layers. Once I was happy with the general outlines, I started on a rough colour sketch (using Photoshop's standard brushes with a soft point) to help figure out the colour scheme and composition and to give the client an idea of how things were progressing.

In this case I received some very helpful and positive feedback from the client with some minor changes made to the rough.

2. This is what the colour rough looked like once completed. As you can see the sky and mountains are already pretty well developed. At this stage the design of the city is still pretty crude as I'm still thinking about ideas for the style and look of the buildings. Once everyone is happy with the colour sketch, I will start looking for suitable photographic references to use in the painting.

3. If I cannot take the photographs myself I will usually purchase suitable ones from online photographic stock libraries such as istockphoto.com. Above is the original photographic stock that I used for this work.