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Painting Shiny Metal
Enzie,
What works for me is to lay in the whole shape with the darkest value and color, semitransparently, and then add opaque middletones into that while it's wet, and then the highlights with a more heavily-laden brush for some opaque impasto.
Then there is Rembrandt's trick of applying a textured underpainting of pale yellow impasto, letting it dry, and then glazing over it with transparent brown, then wiping it off the high spots with a rag. The most extreme example of this is the man's sleeve in the painting now called "The Jewish Bride," in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Rembrandt did this on quite a few other paintings as well, but with less drastic impasto in the underpainting.
Suggestion is more effective in creating a three-dimensional illusion of reality than too much detail. Apply details selectively, and simplify areas of less than primary importance, for the utmost in realistic appearance.
I remember you from my workshop in San Francisco a few years ago. Hello again.
Virgil Elliott
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