This week I've been practicing painting metal surfaces on the provided line art from the Materials 101 class I'm taking. I first scaled the image up to about 4x the original to get a little more room for details. The downside is it added more work to paint but I wanted a crisper end result. I painted in the shapes first then started to hand paint some gradients and spec but the metal surface seemed either too matte or too glossy.

I initially avoided using the gradient tool in Photoshop because the results seemed kind've crude. But after watching the teacher demo in-class I went back and used the gradient tool on most of the surfaces. Since I used the whole range from black to white I brought the opacity of each gradient down to around 40% and used the overlay blending mode for those layers. Wow that gradient made a big difference.

I have one more week to turn in the assignment, so I'll continue working on the unpainted areas, add more details (bolts, wear, etc.) then do a color and lighting pass.

I'm taking a Materials 101 class which started last week (thanks Uncle Sony for the tuition), first assignment is to paint three spheres of three different materials so here we go!

The pearl was the trickiest because most of the references I found were on a white background reflecting white surfaces while this one is on a dark surface. It started looking more like a fish egg so I tried to make it appear more reflective and less transparent.

Some early steps in my process to make the bricks

Wait for it: Fish egg transforms to pearl