Thursday, January 15, 2015
Metallic Painting Techniques - Real Metal Paint Effects
Stan Winston School of Character Arts: Master Creature Painter & Special Effects Artist, Jamie Grove, takes your knowledge of Metallic Paint Techniques to the next level as he creates two distinctive and seriously eye-popping metal paint treatments to resin castings of the original Predator Enviro (”Bio”) Helmets
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4 comments:
I’ve always admired original science fiction movies such as Alien, and Predator as they take such care to make their props and costumes look believable. The painting technique of using paint on a nail file and quickly rubbing it across the finish to create distress is extremely creative and I would have never thought of. I would normally just use an unpainted nail file, but it often removes the paint during the process. I also had never thought of using purples as shadow. I’ve always seen black as low lights, but it never looked quite right. The low lighting on both the distressed and shiny was an interesting choice. Even the subtle darker overlaying made the indents seem deeper than they were. I was also impressed by the quality of the airbrushing technique, although I shouldn’t be surprised as it was professionally created. I find that airbrushing always drips to some extent, but the paint job was so fine that the helmets seemed to be real metal. This little video inspired me to learn how to airbrush as the potential to have even coats is something that I would like to be able to do.
Looking at this video makes me really want to learn how to do this. Like many I'm sure, as a kid i always wanted to make my own weapons and armor so that i could wear it on halloween or use it to impress my friends. I always watch the behind scenes on movies I like and i remember seeing a similar video with Ironman when they made tony Stark's suit. Every suit was crafted for light wear but made to look like a one machine. They used similar techniques in Star Wars as well to achieve laser blasts on metal, and wear and tear from fighting in the galaxy. The techniques such as the ones used add so much to it but when looking at the object itself you would never really think that these colors and techniques would add so much realism. I think its differences like these, between just a coat of metallic paint and the various techniques used here, that transforms say a peace of painted foam into a realistic chunk of granite or wood. These skills would be highly useful when trying to make it in the entertainment industry.
I’ve always loved to see how old props and costumes were made before CGI became so prevalent. Nowadays they seem to just put all their actors in motion capture suits and be done with it, but I’ve always admired and respected movies more when they used real things- or foam that looks like the real thing. For this Predator helmet in particular I was interested in how he put paint on the file before distressing the helmet and how that helped to add dimension to the scrapes without having to do a bunch of layers of paint. It was also interesting how he used purple and blue for the shadows. So often do we forget the color of light that would be cast on the object or in the shadow and instead think of just darkness as shadow. But that is so often not the case, and painting that quality of light on the object can add a really cool dimension and contrast that would be harder to get with just lighting. This video makes me really want to learn how to airbrush because of how even the gradients were and how realistic he made the helmet work. That would be so cool to do for yourself.
To think that the world’s most fearsome predator can be remade by painting a mask. I for one am not the greatest artist in the world, and I don’t plan on trying to achieve that reputation especially when it comes to painting. I’m used to the type of painting with either a brush or with my fingers, how can you go wrong with that? You try throwing in some air brushing, and throw in what looked like a file, definitely threw a curve to my abilities. It’s intriguing to see the different processes that artists use, to get the effect they desire. Sometimes using the most bizarre items are the ones that work the most. In this case there was a file being used I guess to scar it up, and create a more realistic battle effect. The end result looked pretty good, so it worked. Now I guess the next thing to do from here is to get some tutorials at some point to fine-tune my weakness of painting.
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