Matte painting plays a major role in today’s films. The first known matte painting shot was made in 1907 by Norman Dawn (ASC), you can see how the traditional matte painting evolved from “The Wizard Of Oz” to the ground breaking “Avatar”. In this tutorial I’m gonna show you some techniques in matte painting to create a distressed surreal cityscape.

In my last (and first) article here on MyInkBlog, I dove into some of the key differences that exist between Clipping Masks and Layer Masks in Photoshop. We touched on several different areas, but near the beginning of the article I wrote:

Twitter is a form of social networking, communication, promotion and news site all under one banner. As long as what you have to say is under 140 characters you can pretty much say what you want. There is no censorship, and increasing the number of followers only goes to expand the number of people your message is going to reach.

As web designers, we never know what field our next client is gonna to come from, so we always have to be prepared to work in their niche, even if it is outside our proverbial design box, and therefore outside our comfort zone.

There is an old saying that rings true, no matter what forum or context it’s applied in. ‘You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.’ We were thinking of this the other day, and how with some minor tweakage the statement could become a powerful statement of affirmation for designers, or at least it could lead us towards this freeing affirmation.

The number of submissions for this contest were surprisingly low, given that CodeSublime was offering a full PSD to Wordpress service valued at about $600. That being said the winning design was very much deserving. Congratulations to Phillysoul11.

The guys at Concept Feedback asked me to help them get the word out for the launch of their new premium concept accounts. This new feature gives users an opportunity to get maximum exposure for their concept. Once a premium concept is live, it is featured on their homepage for 1 week, giving users maximum traffic and reviews.

If you haven’t already heard about Seesmic’s recent acquisition of Ping.fm, well then, spoiler alert…they did that. This will inevitably raise the profile of the service provided by Ping.fm, and that got me thinking about this service and any others like it that are out there.

2009 marked the end of a swift moving decade. For MyInkBlog, it was filled with big growth from a statistics and learning perspective. I am thankful for all the awesome readers and guest authors that helped make this community fun and possible.

It was so nice to have a little Christmas break. I feel re-energized to come back with some great posts and continue work on improving this blog into the new year. I’ve got some redesign elements to introduce, including a new logo which I plan to reveal in the coming months. This month’s MyInkTrail was relatively small, but its still packed with interesting design articles, tutorials, freebies and more.