Quick metal colour tutorial
(using an airbrush type tool)
If you study metal in real life you will notice that a large part is white/ light coloured and that there is a combination of contrasting light and dark areas.
First looking at gold colour. The common mistake is to colour gold as yellow which looks wrong. If you look at real gold you will see it varies but tends to have a 'brassy' look. So for the base colour i'm going to use a greyed/ brown pale yellow.
I choose the shadow colour to have a darker shade but with more brown/ orange in it.
And again until you are happy with the shadows.
Now for the highlight. An important point when colouring metal is that it often has a 'horizon' line where there is a line of dark colour next to the highlight (shine). Getting this right will pretty much do the job of making something metal shiney as you don't often see it in nature.
Adding the lightest colour. This has quite a lot of dark on so you can use more of the lighter colours to get the shine. As you can see, this is done quickly so looks a little 'stripey'. You can take your time and get it more smooth looking and try more colours in the shading/ highlight.
Its the same for silver.
However, silver often isn't completely grey, try adding some tints or colours from the background that it could be reflecting. (Gold tends to reflect everything as a dark washed out green.)
How things reflect is based on the shape of the surface. If the shape is round, the line would curve to match. The reflection may be distorted by also reflecting background stuff. Also it may be distorted if the surface isn't flat. If the object is on the ground it would reflect the ground as a shadow on the lower part, but not quiite meet the bottom edge.
(Note- on corners or sharp edges, the very edge of the top bit is white and the edge that meets it is dark, creating a 'horizon' line. This is why the square colouring looks like it has a ridge in the middle)
All content, images, pictures, character designs, tutorials and concepts on this site are © to Abigail Wood unless otherwise stated. Do not use anything from this site without permission