A car portrait, painted from a photograph

Car paint is a mirror, and the reflection is the subject

Look at a photograph of a dark car and you will see the horizon running through the door, a bright band along the shoulder where light catches the crown of the wing, and a dark strip underneath where the body reflects the road. Those three bands do more for the sense of curvature than any amount of blending, and they are painted early and kept simple.

Chrome, glass and polished wheels are where a painter overworks. Every reflected detail is visible in a photograph and almost none of it should be painted: a wing mirror containing a whole street, painted literally, becomes a tiny city that pulls the eye out of the picture. Reflections go in at the value and colour they actually are, at a fraction of the detail.

Metallic flake cannot be reproduced literally at any sane scale. What reads as metallic is a soft gradient with a few sharp specks near the highlight, and it only works if the gradient underneath is right. Flake texture over a flat base looks like glitter, which is why a great deal of cheap car art looks like a birthday card.

Wheels, gaps and the geometry people check

A wheel seen from the front three-quarter is an ellipse, not a circle, and the spokes compress towards the far side. Get the ellipse angle wrong by ten degrees and the car appears to be turning. The centre cap sits at the centre of the ellipse rather than of the tyre, and the gap between tyre and arch stays roughly constant; widen it and the car looks lifted.

Then the specifics: five spokes or a mesh, the shape of the rim lip, whether a brake caliper shows, the height of the tyre sidewall. These are what an owner sees first. If your car has aftermarket wheels and the only photograph shows the originals, say so — we will not paint wheels from a brochure. Kerbed rims and stone chips are a separate decision, covered below.

Angles, backgrounds and the number plate

The angle that flatters almost every car is a front three-quarter taken at bumper height, four or five metres back, with the lens at roughly a 50mm equivalent. Phone cameras held at arm's length use a wide lens that bulges the near wing and shrinks the rear, and that distortion is the main reason a photograph of a car looks worse than the car does. Step back and crop.

Background decides whether the result reads as a portrait or a snapshot. A garage interior gives dark, controlled reflections and a workshop feel; an empty road gives space and a horizon; a plain wall is the quietest option and often the best for a strongly coloured car. Number plates can be painted as they are, blanked, or replaced with one of your choosing — but not with a registration that belongs to somebody else.

Rust, dents and kerbed wheels are worth a decision rather than an assumption. On a first car, the dents are part of the memory and should stay. On a restored car they should go. Tell us which you want, and expect us to say when removing damage would change the shape of a panel enough that the car stops looking like itself.