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I teach digital painting. You would be surprised how many students ask how to achieve ‘the color gold’. One of the qualifiers of physical paint (as opposed to digital paint) is, not surprisingly, its materiality. Explaining to young people what materiality is can be a tough ride. I have to remind myself that for some of them the very first experience of painting was on an iPad.

Of TFA, it is no surprise that he was greatly influenced by Byzantine mosaics. Both are supremely decorative, flat and strongly symmetrical.

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Well, hold on. Gold is a specific color, specularity and emissiveness. I wouldn’t expect to achieve it in a 2D drawing program, and I’m not sure what fraction of monitors can achieve it at all, but it’s simple enough in Unreal Engine.

In addition to teaching digital painting I also teach 3d. What you describe is completely correct and something I would emulate using Blenders BSDF shader. This would emulate real world materiality, but my point is that color is the lest of the key properties of a metal. For the most part, the Colour would derive from environment reflections, which would all be tinted with ‘gold color’.

> it’s simple enough in Unreal Engine

The color of physical metallic gold is outside of sRGB color space. Maybe you could get close enough to fool people with some of the best modern HDR's (I don't know), but for most of the history of modern computing it didn't matter how good you were at digital animation -- no display could display the color "gold" even if you could mathematically compute the right color.

sRGB is a red herring here. There are colors outside the sRGB gamut, but those colors are all very saturated. "Gold", including the color of the actual metal, isn't saturated enough to be among them.

The real problem is that gold is a mirror. It's shiny and changes appearance based on viewing angle and environment. A computer can only simulate that for the scene within the computer. It can't make the image itself more or less shiny than the physical monitor.

Without the shininess, gold just looks like a dirty yellow.

I'm not an expert on color profiles and HDR stuff but it seems like the kind of thing that's possible with PBR and the right color profiling, which isnt too modern.

I'm sure that there are some colors in the human-visible range that aren't covered by sRGB but idk if gold is one of them

It's just orange, reflective orange. The italics part is the rest of the owl.

I wonder about things that can't be portrayed by our digital devices.

Another one is the "speckles" you see when illuminating a surface with a laser.

> Explaining to young people what materiality is can be a tough ride.

Sounds like an excellent opportunity to introduce them to drawing from observation? They don't have to understand what "materiality" is, just see that the object appears different depending on how they hold it, where the lights are and what else is around it. (Assuming that you don't have a bar of gold hanging out in your class you could grab some toy gold coins.)

Skill issue, Warhammer painters are all over it:

http://razzaminipainting.blogspot.com/2016/07/non-metallic-m...

What the fuck are you doing with that link?

Here’s the link without the bullshit: http://razzaminipainting.blogspot.com/2016/07/non-metallic-m...

Oh, sorry. I'm at work, and my company uses some dogshit safe browsing wrapper service. Sometimes i forget to trim the prefix off before posting a link. Fixed now, thanks for pointing it out.

I've been learning digital painting. Getting realistic materials is tricky indeed! So far, I've struggled with liquids, metals, glass, and the hardest of all: rocks. It's really hard to get the texture and shadow to feel natural! I'd be thrilled to get a few tips here...

Top tips….

Using a digital brush on its own can be extremely limiting. Digital paint is inherently flat and lifeless. Textured brushes can help, but not much. I would recommend employing natural textures via blend modes. The best blend mode for passing textures from one image to another is overlay. In this way the texture of a photo of a rusty surface may be passed onto a painting of a rock. Essentially painting with textures... or photo-bashing.

Here is a walk through I did for my students…

https://rmit.instructure.com/courses/87565/pages/photoshop-p...

Happy to answer any questions.

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