After battling with my rubbish internet, it finally decided to start upload pictures. Sooo here is my matte painting progress, starting at the start...

Here is my first attempt at making an amazing abstract star night background. It was supposed to look something like this. As you can see it didn't go to plan! I'm not quite sure what happened, but I ended up giving up and starting something different.

After looking into Matte painting some more I decided to start really simple and just experiment with mixing foreground with backgrounds. Again it isn't anything impressive but it got me used to using Photoshop again, and becoming more familiar with new techniques (quick masks etc)

Here is another similar idea, mixing a foreground element with a dark, moody sky. Again this didn't work out as I hadn't taken into account the purple filter the foreground picture had, and the contrast of the sky against it, which is why the colours don't work together and the image doesn't marry well. 

Here is my feeble attempt at trying to paint for the first time in Photoshop, against a sky background element. This is when I decided I needed to start working on tutorials and perhaps instead of concentrating soley on digital matte painting, to perhaps concentrate more on actually learning how to paint first. 

After doing a few tutorials, I quickly painted up this cityscape background. It took about 15 minutes and it isn't great! I have done better, but it's all part of the learning curve I suppose. I feel the greens and reds I have used as highlights haven't worked as well as I had liked them too. 

This is what I'm currently working on for Derek's project. It still needs a lot of work on it, such as trying to marry the sky with the foreground (same story!), improving the city scape, adding smoke and the like and moving the buildings so it will work when it is converted into a 3D image. Apparently, the people making the stereoscopic image need the foreground buildings to not be half cut off - they need the full outline in order to make it look more 3D...

And here's one I made earlier! Its not great but its a start. I am doing to do more and I will upload when my internet allows me too :)