I am a Lead Digital Matte Painter, Environment Artist and freelance Concept Artist working for Goodbye Kansas Studios in Stockholm, Sweden. I joined VFX industry in 2017 and had the opportunity to work on amazing projects like The Lion King, Star Wars: Andor, Downton Abbey: New Era, Call of the Wild, Artemis Fowl, Good Omens, Rebecca, Cursed, stop motion animated film Chuck Steel Night of the Trampires and many more.

I am proficient at painting using Photoshop, hard-surface modeling and uving in Maya, generating terrains and building assets as well as scattering set ups in Houdini, optimising, detailing and sculpting in Zbrush, texturing my assets, getting them all in Clarisse for layout and LookDev and this all bring to final render and composite it in Nuke.

Lately I have been focusing on creating real-time environments in Unreal Engine, and developing my coding skills to be able to build more.

I have a high interest in building affordable learning source for enthusiastic artists who want to join us in this crazy running VFX business and who want to become Matte Painters and Environment Artists. That's why I have launched Alpha Brush and as part of that I mentor entry level artists.

https://gumroad.com/alphabrush

Are you entry level Matte Painter and you need some advice? Drop me a message! :)

Feel free to check out some of my photography too: https://www.instagram.com/irs_smitakova_lensart/

Publications
VFXCZ: http://vizualniefekty.cz/interview-irena-smitakova-matte-painter/
ART OF VFX (mention): https://www.artofvfx.com/rebecca-murray-barber-vfx-supervisor-co-founder-milk-visual-effects/
LEARNSQUARED: https://blog.learnsquared.com/student-stories/ep8-you-need-to-learn-to-fail/
KITBASH3D interview tutorial: https://kitbash3d.com/blogs/news/3d-models-in-matte-paintings
KITBASH3D contest: https://kitbash3d.com/blogs/news/utopia-contest-winners?_pos=1&_sid=6dd2e9b54&_ss=r
ARTSTATION FEATURED https://magazine.artstation.com/2021/08/featured-pro-portfolio-irena-smitakova/

KITBASH3D - Cover art for Neo San Francisco kit https://kitbash3d.com/products/neo-san-francisco