Painting Realistic Metal

In this article, I talk about two simple ways to achieve realistic metal looks.

Gunmetal Effect

For this technique, all you need is black paint, silver paint, and a dry brush.

For simplicity's sake, let's say you're painting a tiny gun like this one to the left. The first thing you want to do is to cover the entire piece in black paint. Lamp black acrylic will get you a nicely-pigmented base.

The reason we cover it in black first is to get it into all of those details in the sculpt.

When that's dry, take a dry brush, dip it in your silver paint, then wipe off as much of the paint on a dry napkin as you can. You want the brush evenly loaded up while using very little paint.

Then, gently pull the dry brush across the surface of your gun. You don't want to push the silver into all of the crevices as we did with the black paint (which is why the brush is dry). We're looking to slowly build up layers of silver on the raised details, leaving the sunken details mainly black.

Keep making passes with silver until you're satisfied. To be safe, I would apply layers of spray fixative or Mod Podge intermittently. This will make sure that you don't accidentally wipe away any of your progress.

When painting with gold, use a brown first layer rather than black. Otherwise, it's the same.

When painting something that's meant to have paint on it, like the tool in the first image, you can give the illusion of the paint being chipped and the metal showing through by dragging your dry brush with silver paint over top of the colored zones (in this example, the red handle).

Mirror Glaze Marker

The prices of these things are a little ridiculous, but you really can't beat that shine.

Here's the brand that I have. It was about $15, but I've seen these things priced up to $30 and above.

The ink does look a little lumpy in person, and they do fill in details that dry brushing would pick up on, but if you don't mind that, using a chrome/mirror glaze marker is a lot more straightforward than using paint, and it looks a lot like metal.

Love,

Haley

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