I mean, you take one look at Greek statues and Roman busts and you realize that people figured how to aim for realism, at least when it came to the human body and faces, over 2000 years ago.
Yet, unlike sculpture, paintings and drawings remained, uh, “immature” for centuries afterwards (to my limited knowledge, it was the Italian Renaissance that started making realistic paintings). Why?
…but then you have to know the properties of color in your media too if you want to really match colors to a reference
There is no colors for a reference, the colors in reality are way way more expressive than our dumb blue, yellow, red tube colors.
Oh but there are. I have painted cars and done automotive class airbrush graphics for many years. There is a ton to know and learn about when it comes to colors, matching, and expression.
I didn’t say there is nothing to learn, I think quite to the contrary. But there is no paint for light, nor gold or lots of other things, so you have to fake it. Which is the hard part.
I agree to an extent, but light is invisible. Colors are a frequency phenomenon and the same property in both instances.
Part of the art of mixing and matching paints for cars is abstracting the various spaces and focusing on each. I need to see the flat tone, opacity, coarseness and composition (metallics/pearls), layering (pearls), flop (how the color changes depending on facet angles and tint the tone of this independent of the perpendicular tone).
I’m unusual in this space as well. I specialized in very small repairs where I am mixing paints in much smaller batches than the minimum recipe supplied by the paint vendor for the original color code of the vehicle. I knew paints on a much deeper level where I mixed mostly by eye and intuition. I had many techniques, but overall, I had to know the tinting properties of around a hundred different colors and how each one would behave in combination with the rest. My skills were very much a matter of flattening my perspective and observing three dimensional colors as if they were a two dimensional abstraction with several little 2d bubble universe facets to play with.
It is a learned skill. I hired several employees over the years. It quickly becomes evident how a person thinks and their ability to see color on a level that most humans never encounter. Even now, I still know that white and black do not exist and are simply byproducts of other colors and properties. True black would be impossible to see, and white would be a blinding light source specifically tailored to the individual’s vision spectrum and neural processing. I see colors and complex properties in everything.
Interesting read for sure!
You should make an AMA, bet a lot of people are curious about how to get that correct paint and more. I am!
Things have changed a lot since I painted. All of the paint systems I used have been phased out in favor of water based alternatives. Those changes largely stopped the way I did my work as water based colors require a very consistent and controlled environment like an advanced downdraft spray booth. I could control many behaviors with the evaporative speed of solvents and reducers in ways that are not possible any more. Now those behaviors (I assume) are handled with temperature, humidity, and a much larger feathering area for masking changes with less accurate paint. The funny part is that clear coat catalyst and solvents are the largest pollution and health hazard by far. The switch to water based color coats massively increases the overhead of a body shop, creates the need to have whole room IR heaters or integrate them into the booth, and then adds an extra panel to prep and feather the repair on every side. It amounts to a massive increase in the cost of auto body work that includes far more pollution and energy use just to say the most insignificant aspect, the color coat is water based. That is a big reason I stopped painting and why my experience is not exactly relevant to the present.