Day to Night Matte Painting

This is my first matte painting ever, created for my advanced photorealism class. We were provided images of the moon, a bright daytime sky, and some pictures of trees to make custom brushes from. We had to turn the sky into a nighttime sky to be integrated in our own painted scene.

I had never known much about matte painting before, and I absolutely fell in love with the process. It's the perfect mix of 3D modeling (though no modeling was done for this particular piece), lighting, digital painting, texturing, photography and compositing.

I'm really looking forward to the next project!