The Haunted House was developed during Halloween, when I wanted to express the idea of an eerie-looking house. Matte painting has always fascinated me, and with the help of digital tools today, it is possible to enrich environments more easily than ever before.
Study of the Image
The general process employed for this image is to use photographic elements, combine them and enhance them in original ways. My intention was to express anxiety, isolation and the frustration felt during a horror movie. There’s a cliché in these movies where a group of friends stand in front of a haunted mansion in awe. The main details of the haunted house required: dry and twisted trees, a cloudy dark sky that created the most horrible feeling of isolation and different types of gravestones. I used these photographic elements with the intention to modify and enhance them later on.
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Composition
To compose my collage of images, I use the ‘Rule of Thirds’ which is a photographic composition dividing the space into 9 identical pieces on a grid (thirds). I insert the house on the right third and a twisted tree on the left third. In terms of depth, the image is divided into four planes of depth. The closest is on the twisted tree to the left, then the gravestones, the tree on the right, and the house almost in the background. This way, your eye is moved around the image in an anti-clockwise direction for a dizzying effect.
Tone and Colour
The house is neglected by humans and infested by ghosts. To portray this, I opted for a green-yellow tone, which is associated with illness. It is the colour of decomposing human skin, urine, mucus and many other repulsive things.
Using the Brightness/Contrast settings in Corel PhotoPaint, and tweaking the tone curve, I was able to totally change the original photograph (which was in broad daylight) to a washed-out house that looked like it was photographed on an overcast, rainy day. I recovered a bit of colour by using the Hue/Saturation settings to make the house a slight green-yellow colour. |
