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 Supershandy wrote:
I can't tell if you have a yellow light or if it had given it a Perlescent effect and the light is reflecting off the gold particles.

It's a quick work around but for a proper metallic, it really needs to be a metallic powder of that colour for it to really pop.

However, that said, if you're happy with the result then it was a successful test overall

The pictures suck showing how metallic it is, even with all the different ones I took (some with flash, some not) to try to capture the effect. A proper camera and something painted bigger than a shoulder pad (like a whole marine!) should better show it. Whenever the heck I get time to do that I will post a picture of it.

It *is* definitely the light reflecting off the gold paint, it still looks like a metal in real life. It's mostly red, but still looks a bit gold too. So it is not some deep metallic red. For a single step applied directly on top of primer it is pretty darn good methinks. Maybe that mix and then just one wash of ink on top would be enough, I dunno, we'll see.

I usually have that problem when trying to take pictures of metallics but a good camera (DSLR type or a high megapixel camera phone) will normally get them to show up at their best,

Your point on it still showing some gold is partly the reason why metallics are so hard to do and as AllSeeingSkink said, it's easier to just buy one rather than trying to do a DIY one unless you know where to go for materials as I did to create them, it took me about 15 different batches and about a month on my INSTAR line to get a really good metallic that we could sell and we tried all sorts of different ways of approaching it, except yours

I'm not flaming you though it's always good to see novel approaches to things to improve the hobby and yours is just another one of these attempts and I salute you for it!

However, since you are already at this stage, the extra wash will probably help fill in the gaps where the gold is showing through, but I'm not sure if it will take more than one coat to do that.

Photographing metallics is damned near impossible because how they look depends so much on lighting and also dynamic effects that can't be translated in a 2D image. I know my metallic blue car looks completely different on a bright sunny day compared to a cloudy day compared to in the evening under street lights.

Even if you have a good photobooth, sometimes it can make metallics look flatter than they appear in real life, and you can never recreate the way the light dances off a vibrant metallic.

NMM techniques I reckon saw such a rise partly because they photograph really well, they look really impressive on a computer monitor, but when I'm actually holding a model in my hand give me a true metallic over a NMM any day