My first matte painting

A matte painting is a painted representation of a landscape, set, or distant location that allows filmmakers to create the illusion of an environment that would otherwise be too expensive or impossible to build or visit. - from Wikipedia.

Yes, i just referenced Wikipedia. However, the definition fits and I feel it is important to understand what exactly a matte painting is. After all, I didnt exactly know what it was before I started this project.

Now then, first things first. The idea is where it all begins and, after much research, I found myself wanting to do something with castles and waterfalls. The subject can be a little cliche in the matte painting world if you arent careful. Anyway, the first thing I did after doing a little research is put down some basic thumbnails of the scene, looking specifically for a good composition.

These are very simple but they gave me a good idea of composition, which, at this point, is the most important aspect to think of. I chose the bottom thumbnail to work with.

The next step for me was to do some more refined thumbnails with the same composition in color. I picked out some good cliffs that I though would work wellas a basis for the background and midlle ground.

Above is the reference picture I used for the middle ground cliffs.

Below are two pictures of the buildings I used in the final matte painting. I modeled the buildings in 3D studiomax and rendered them out into a .png format. A few things I found very helpful at this stage.
1. The better the model is modeled, the easier it is to paint it in photoshop.
2. Make sure you set up a realistic light source as you want the light source to be in the final painting. This will help out tremendously with shadow shapes.
3. Equally important is to set up a camera at the exact location the painting is viewed from. This required me to place some of the buildings very close and others very far away from the camera. The reason this is important has to do with perspective.

This first pic has the buildings in the distance in the correct position but the foreground buildings are not.

Here is the corrected foreground render.

After adding the buildings in their correct place with the cliffs I have created I get this...

I also added the waterfalls. 

The above picture shows the castles painted. To do this I looked directly at the reference that I used to model the castle. Here is just one of the pictures I used for the buildings.

It is important to tie the foreground to the mid and background. So I spent alot of time trying to make the foreground work well with the rest of the painting. The above pic also shows the rocks that I hand painted. For those, I found it helpful to make some rock brushes to give me a basis for the formations.

Next I added the sky, which really started to tie the matte painting together

The last step took me alot of time, and that entailed just buttoning up all of the little things I saw wrong with the picture. I found that adding a photo filter to the whole painting really made the colors work together. It gave the feeling of a mid afternoon dying sunlight. Below is the result as well as my final render.