Painting Gold

I chanced upon the blog Surface Fragments yesterday while talking to a student in a Design class about illusionistic depictions of gold. Shout out to the blog's author Alan Carroll for taking the time to put together these mockups. It's best to read all of his comments in context on the original blog post but I put a sample of them here because they are worth sharing.

The takeaway is to create the illusion of gold, something that appears very bright and shiny, a painter should actually focus mostly on darker neutral tones tightly huddled together and then jump about there values up for the highlight. But even then the highlights in these two examples max out on the Munsell scale at around 6 for the darker gold at the top of this post, or an 8 for the lighter gold on the second mockup. Here are but a couple additional images from their original post. Visit their blog for more. 

Rembrandt / René Antoine Houasse

Raphael