Wired:
A car comes in, a 2015 Toyota Camry, let’s say, in Ruby Flare Pearl (that’s red) needing a bashed-in door Bondo’d and sanded. You just go to a shelf and take down 2015 Toyota Ruby Flare Pearl, click a canister into an airgun, and swoosh, you’re back on the road, right?
Nope. Car companies have put 50,000 to 60,000 car colors on the road, but even a big body shop like Alameda Collision Repair has just 70 or 80 colors on its shelves. Turns out Gonzalez isn’t just a fast painter, he’s a fast matcher. “I get the closest one,” he says, “and then I match the color.”
I knew the act of painting a car was difficult but I’d given no thought to how hard colour matching was.
Some good color theory here, people don’t quite get how mixing paint colors differs from colored light, so mixing pigments uses some methods quite opposite of projected light. I work with some similar metal flake pigments, hey what’s this about gloss angle and “disorienter colorant?” That sounds like a good explanation of something I’ve been testing..
Very cool. Reminds me a tiny bit of the printing-press operators I used to work with, who’d have to mix inks to match given colors, and not always according to formula. This car guy adds what sounds like a museum-level restoration eye to the job.