How To Remove Paint From Metal Railings

5 bang-up tips for painting metal surfaces

There are various different looks for metal objects - here's how to get them

Words: Paco Rico Torres

There are many different kinds of metallic, but there are some characteristics that are mutual to most of them. First off, metallic is difficult, so effort to represent that hardness. The silhouette of a metallic piece should be clean and precipitous - don't apply soft brushes when you are painting metallic edges, and whenever yous are painting a metal object keep its shape defined.

When metal is clean, it reflects a lot of low-cal. Think of information technology every bit a steamy mirror: information technology reflects the surrounding colours and main sources of light, but you can't see things or people reflected on it clearly. The more polished the metal is, the more like it is to a mirror.

There are many factors that can affect the look of a metal surface. Perhaps the almost common are scratches, dents, and rust. Scratches are basically minor imperfections on the surface that reflect the calorie-free in a different direction, and so they can be depicted as white lines in the highlights, but they should be almost imperceptible in the shadows.

A dent is basically a scratch just much bigger, and rust can easily be painted by using textured brushes.

When creating a boring metal surface, I try to continue the object'southward silhouette solid and sharp, and depict the reflections of low-cal and color every bit realistically as possible. To achieve a nice hard metal surface, I try to paint information technology as smoothly as I can across the object. I use blending tools (like the H2o brush in PaintTool SAI) for that purpose - they work quite well.

02. How to paint scratches

To paint scratches, I simply reduce the amount of polish of the metal, and apply some texture (a photo, for case) in an Overlay layer. Then I paint lots of white lines. Call back that the scratches are visible mainly because they reflect light, and so in shadows they shouldn't exist visible. Also try to paint them in areas likely to be scratched, not all over the place.

To paint a dented metal surface, you accept to first consider where the low-cal is coming from and pigment it accordingly. Also, the shape of the paring itself is also of import. Remember that metal is a hard fabric. When the dent is caused past a sword or some other abrupt weapon, you will usually observe a scratch in the lesser of the dent, so hither y'all'd paint a white line.

04. How to paint rust

For rust, the key is using a castor with a texture, or a brush composed of many small dots (there are bones brushes in Photoshop CS6 that work well). Only paint over the metal with three or four different tones of brown and orange, to create a rusty texture. Go on some zones clean to brand information technology more realistic (rust grows faster around edges and scratches).

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Our sister title ImagineFX, the world's leading magazine for fantasy and sci-fi digital artists, originally contained the previous four tips - and every calendar month it contains an eclectic mixture of in-depth workshops from the earth's best artists, galleries and interviews, features, community news, software and hardware reviews, and the latest sci-fi and fantasy films and comics. You lot tin can get a costless sample issue hither!

Paco Rico Torres is a freelance illustrator living in Spain who has produced art for several card games, magazines, books and roleplaying games.

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