Artist comments :

My name is Frank Hong and I’m a concept artist based in Toronto Canada.

The City of Angels matte painting was a personal piece I finished in 2009. It’s more of a spontaneous piece since I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted going into the process. As there wasn’t a brief, I was free to take the image
in any direction I wanted.

To create an environment, setting the right mood and atmosphere is, in my opinion, the most important part. It’s like giving personality to a character; it just needs to be there. In this case, I decided to create a sci-fi cityscape at dawn and to take advantage of the morning fog to get the cold and dead feeling I wanted.

In my research for the piece, I liked the looks of the not-so-perfect cityscape. Tall, old buildings and messy layouts spoke to me better than clean cut matchbox sci-fi. I wanted to use this contrast between the new and the old. I took
a reference image and horizontally copied it three times  making the connection almost seamless. This
filled the left part of the city base.

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Artist comments:

My brother Surat Toimastov is professional photographer who travels a lot and shoots different places here in Tajikistan. Looking through his amazing pictures sometimes I am really shocked by how beautiful and mysterious these places can be.

So the story of this image begins from this photo, which was taken somewhere in the Pamir Mountains. I was really inspired by this photo and started to imagine some kind of structurs or industrial complex just behind that horizon line.

So I took the photo and quickly put the main forms and ideas down as a quick sketch. I wanted this structure to rise over the top of the mountain and wanted to really emphasize the size of this structure. I also wanted to have the people in the image arriving at some kind of arctic base or something similar and so I put some guards and flying machines along their path.

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This is a matte painting that I have realized for the “Barbarossa” movie directed by Renzo Martinelli in 2009. The request of the director was for a singular version of the High Middle Ages Rome set in a river with a church in the background. I’ve been inspired from an old painting of Rome with Castel Sant’Angelo. The painting settings have been very helpful to me to realise this scene and it has allowed me to create a portrayal of Rome’s sunup in the year 1000

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