How To Paint With Pearls & Flakes – What is Pearl Paint? Painting Your Car With Pearl Paint!

How To Paint With Pearl…

In this post let’s briefly touch on automotive pearl painting, pearls, flakes and micro sequence flake.

The most popular automotive pearls come in 2 forms. The first is your powder pearls then your liquid pearls. The difference is nothing much. One is just mixed in a sappy liquid which you scoop out and add to your clear coat.

Pros and Cons of liquid pearls: As time goes on, you’ll have a problem opening your jar because of the pearl mixture getting in between the can cap and jar. But with dry pearls, you won’t have this problem and there still very easy to open and mix into your paints.

automotive pearl jars

I’ve also noticed that you can get some colors in liquid pearl that you can’t get with the dry pearls. Here is a picture of what the dry cans of flake and pearl looks like by House of Kolor paints.

Adding pearls to paint: Pearls are added in your clear coat during your base/clear paint job. The question I usually get is if there is a recommended amount that should be added into your clear coat?

The answer is no. It’s all user preference. Your best bet is to test a panel of your base color choice followed by a mixture of the desired pearl in your clear.

A safe pearl/clear mixture would be about a teaspoon full of pearl per quart of clear coat. Just like painting candy, the more coats you lay on the darker and more visible your pearl coat will become.

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As an example: one teaspoon of granulated white sugar is equal to about 4.2 grams. There are approximately 4-8 grams of sugar in a teaspoon of sugar, depending on its granularity.

Mixing units
It is important to note that a teaspoon (tsp.) is a unit of volume, whereas a gram is a unit of weight.
Example:
If you are buying a bottle of cola with 44 grams of sugar, you would divide 44 by 4.2 which is equal to about 10 teaspoons of sugar.

Source: https://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_grams_are_in_a_teaspoon_of_sugar#ixzz1iPbLsSIX

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 About Flakes: You basically have two kinds of flake, Jumbo and Micro sequence flake. Here are a few pictures of both:

Automotive Jumbo Flake

As you can see these flakes are commonly painted on lowrider classics. There is a trick when painting with jumbo flake which we explain and show you within the VIP Club and Trainings.

A lot of times when painting with these jumbo flake, you need to lay a few extra layers of clear to bury your flake.

Most times you even have to let your initial flake coat dry for a day or two, then color sand followed by another prep stage with layers of clear coat.

5-8 Coats of clear are the norm for these custom flake paint jobs that use jumbo flakes.

Your final result will be a DEEP, GLOSSY & Beautiful finish if color sanded and buffed properly… of course.

If you want to learn more about auto body and painting, repairing dents, rust, installing body kits and custom painting, then check out our VIP Club. You’ll get instant access to top-notch training, VIP forum plus so much more.

The club consists a library full of easy to follow training videos as well as bonus material and is currently home to thousands of VIP members from across the world with varying ages between 16-75 years, male and female, learning from our step-by-step training videos.

Are you ready to take your knowledge to the next level and flaunt your new skills to friends and family
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11 thoughts on “How To Paint With Pearls & Flakes – What is Pearl Paint? Painting Your Car With Pearl Paint!”

  1. I’m interested I your course, but I am just confused on one point. Are your videos accessed online, or do you actually send out DVD’s as the picture online seem to suggest.

    Thanks,
    Tom

    Reply
    • Thomas, sorry for the delay, we are very busy 🙂 anyway, yes the course is all online and most are downloadable. We are also working on a physical package that should be out by summer. Talk soon!

      Reply
  2. Hi Tony
    How are you?I am from INDIA i just going to paint my jeep in few days time. I having few question regarding paint .
    How i can start
    My plan for paint is first pearl coat
    (2) metal flakes
    (3) Kandy bass coat
    (4) clear coat
    Please please let me know step by step
    It will be great help from you.
    Thanks
    Regards
    Anis

    Reply
    • If you plan to put Kandy, it’s not a base. It’s a gloss urethane. Regular clear coat is sprayed over that.

      It would look more like this:

      1. Spray your main base coat
      2. Spray your Kandy coat (2-3 coats)
      3. Mix your clear coat
      4. Add pearl or flake in your clear coat
      5. Spray 2-3 coats.
      6. Mix plain clear coat and spray 2-3 coats.

      I actually have a complete custom video on this process plus a lot more inside of our VIP training club and community.
      You can learn more about that and how it can really help you out a lot here: https://vip-offer.learnautobodyandpaint.com/

      Hope that helped!

      Reply
  3. What’s up Tony, love you videos! I am painting Cobalt Red on a Pontiac G6. I would like to add some pop to this and was wondering what would be the best mico flakes to add to clear coat? I am not looking for a over the top finish, just nice new car look finish, with a small amount of pop, if that makes sense.

    Reply

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