This week we will be painting a car for the Thursday night Paint-a-long and since a car is made up of many reflective surfaces I figured I better talk about those surfaces and how to paint them.
When painting those old classic cars the fun part is the shiny surfaces you get to paint. I have had students ask me if they should buy silver and gold paint for the chrome or shiny metal surfaces. Nope is my answer because that will not make the flat paper surface look like the shiny metal object in your painting. Those metal shiny objects will be dark and light and colored with the local color of the object and the surrounding colors. They will also
be done with hard and soft edges. If the sun is present in the image then the sparkle will also be in the shiny object. Metallic paint will not show those light and darks because it would be painted onto a flat surface and only act like a flat mirror.
Basically, the shiny metal on a car is like a mirror and reflects everything around it. Chrome or shiny colored metal also acts like water on a surface like a wet sidewalk or a calm lake, it reflects all the objects around it. If the shiny object is like a bumper or a grill of a car that is rounded or curved it will act as a funhouse mirror and distort the reflections in the shiny surface. So when painting a shiny surface you usually have to get all the values
and colors from everything in the pictured scene.
If you look closely at the chrome bumper in the image below you will see a mirror reflection of the entire scene in the top bumper piece and also in the bottom bumper piece. basically, a shiny surface acts as a mirror and reflects things from all around it, but in a distorted way depending on the shape of the shiny surface.
