Week 8
Yet another video lecture we had to watch, not found of it but it has to be done.
I decided to watch the video on Ron Crabb. Ron is a matte painter, his paintings are amazing and life like.
Ron paints the backdrops for films and TV. He started off with TV commercials and works free lance from his home, his clients could get his work through the internet.
Ron wanted to be an illustrator or fine art, but he dropped out of college and moved to California. While there Ron got a job doing designs on t-shirts and then got a job with KABC- this job was all hands on and done with out the aid of computers.
When the Quantel paint box came out Ron was let go, but got some free lance work at night for KABC as a free lance, this worked well for Ron because he didn’t have much work to do at night and just got to play around with the new computer software. This got Ron into motion graphics.
Ron showed talents at a very early age and was always drawing, getting his inspirations from nature he saw.
Matte painting is Ron’s main work, matte painting is a background or set piece that cant be built for a film so they are drawn in or painted in, the paintings combine with the live action elements of the film. A lot of films have the scenery drawn in for them because those backgrounds just don’t exist.
Now a days most matte paintings are done digitally with Photoshop and similar programmes. Ron worked on films like “The Last Samurai” and “X-men”, Matte painting can be used for not just doing a whole background but just adding extra bits to a background so that it fits with the film.
From looking at Ron speak about the Taj Mahal scene from “The Bucket List” matte painting requires a lot of work, there were hundreds of layers to make the scene look as real as possible. The different cheats and tweaks used to make the picture perfect. There is an amazing amount of detail added to every picture that Ron paints and from seeing “The Bucket List” i would never of guessed that the backgrounds were just painted in.
Next Ron talks about the transition into the digital illustrator and how lots of new programmes are coming about that make digital art look more and more like its been really painted.
All in all I love the work that Ron does its just so cool and vibrant looking its hard to look at it and not feel a sense of awe and to show you that ill add some of Ron’s work. Looking at these pictures its hard to believe that they don’t exist and the ones that look out of this world you wish they did exist.
