A good selection of images for Matte Painting projects is one of the most important steps to guarantee the success of the composition, in addition to saving time in retouching for the integration of each image in the final piece.
Having quality resources where to find the images which best fit our Photobashing or Sketching will save us a lot of time. That’s why in this article I want to share the stock resources that I usually consult when we face a Matte painting project.
Images for Matte painting projects
Photobash
On this website we find packages of images of very good quality at very affordable prices. Photobash’s philosophy is quality content, exclusive and at competitive prices. After the success they have derived to the web photobash.co that in addition to the image packs offer 3D kits (models and textures) to integrate into our compositions.
Matte paintint
Mattepaint is a community which has grown very fast in recent years thanks to the rise of Matte painting not only in areas of leisure and entertainment. At first they came to offer very good images as part of contest which they still organize, but now you need to be a user to get them, plus access to courses and other interesting resources to improve as Mattepainter.
Reference picture
In this first resource we find 3 well differentiated categories (Figures – Landscape – Free) to download images both free and paid.
Gumroad
Gumroad is a well-known platform for artists to share their creations to the world by selling their digital products.
Thus we can find, among other resources, users who create packages of very good quality images for Matte painting projects that we will access upon payment, although in some cases the price is set by the buyer at will.
Graphicscrate
In Graphicscrate, in addition to finding a wide variety of images, we have at our disposal all kinds of resources for Matte painting projects, such as textures, effects, HDRI maps, or textures prepared for use in 3D models.
All resources has a free version (low quality) and payment version (a resolution from 4K up to 12K).
Flickr
Esta galería de imágenes de Flickr la añado a la lista ya que he hecho mucho uso de ella para la creación de mis primeros proyectos Matte Painting. Son más de 600 imágenes principalmente de paisajes. También podemos encontrar más contenido de este tipo a través de la web, pero fíjate bien bajo que licencia de uso están.
I add this Flickr image gallery to the list beacause I have made a lot of use of it for the creation of my first Matte Painting projects. There are more than 600 images mainly of landscapes. We can also find more of this kind of content through the web, but take a good look under which license they are.
Other options
We can also turn to stock image websites, although they do not focus exclusively on this type of projects, we can find images that can fit in the composition, as Carles Marsal shows us in one of his courses on Matte Painting.