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.