Today I want to talk a bit about drawing metal surfaces and materials. Some of you may be great at drawing metal and some of you may not know how to draw metal at all. That's ok, it's sort of complicated because there is reflection involved but we're going to try to keep it simple so that we can start. First of all, just know that everything has reflection but every material that exists has either high reflectivity or low reflectivity except maybe... the air. But anyway... with low reflectivity you don't need to stress so much, you can make it up for the most part because most of the light in the reflection would get scattered. With higher reflectivity however, you sometimes might need to imagine the surface almost like a mirror with a metal tint. With a mirror such as one that could be in your room or bathroom, you will see a full simple reflection of your surroundings, with metal it's similar but you don't really see the reflection of the colors, just the light. Let me try to demonstrate what I'm talking about with a few examples. Obviously metal objects aren't actual mirrors and if you're drawing some kind of metal you probably already have an idea of what general color it's going to be so you'd draw that first, but when you want to increase the reflectivity, you need to display the actual reflection of light within the reflection. This is usually done very sharply and with high contrast. Here's some examples. On the left, there is low reflectivity. These examples still portray the reflection of light but it's very dull and the light is blurred. This could be useful to give the impression that the material is dull and worn out like it may have little scratches all over it. And on the right we have high reflectivity. This is useful when you want to portray that the material is brand new like it was recently crafted and ready for use.

See how on the left you see light, but you don't see "reflection". You actually still do but the reflection is so blurred that you don't notice it. On the right you can almost literally see the sun within the reflections. The high reflectivity in this case below is similar but the halberd blade also has a reflection of light bouncing off the floor. This is useful if you want to show that maybe the floor is made of marble for example.

However in some cases, you want to use less reflection. This guy below is an "Old Knight" from Dark Souls 2. Old Knights were ancient knights that were presumably resurrected as guards or for battle. It is uncertain if their armor was made of metal or stone but either way, their armor was super worn out and dull. So sometimes it doesn't make sense to shine it and instead give it a very rough appearance.

If you want to be really extreme with reflection, you can do that too. Just shows rays of light popping out from the reflection.

So those are my few tips and techniques about drawing metal. Reflection can get more advanced, but you guys know I'm a simple artist that likes to keep things fun and not overcomplicate things so that's it for this tutorial. I hope you found it useful and learned a thing or two. I'll have to figure out what I want to cover next one so until next time, see you later!