Matching Satin White Pearl???
 

Bought some cheap-o side skirts and want to spray them to match my satin white pearl car. Anybody had luck with color-matched spray cans? Planning to prime, base, and clear from a can. Somebody has to have some experience with this! Got the skirts for super cheap so I'm up for experimentation.

Pearl paint is extremely hard to match, especially with only base+clear. If you want to get somewhat close to matching go have them professionally sprayed, if you want them to actually match you'll likely want to have someone blend the paint into your car as well.

Subaru dealer might be able to paint it for you. Othrrwise.....paint it in black perhaps?

@carma143 does make a good point, a contrasting color wouldn't need to match anything and would look pretty good.

Why would you even put cheap ass body panels on your car, let alone spray painted ones?

I could see if it was a beater, but it doesn't make sense for a 2 year old car. Sure it might look good from 20feet away, but it's going to make the car look cheap up close.

Guys, you're going to give me cancer. The car is my baby, I'm not going to ruin it by tacking pieces of garbage all over it. I'm taking this on as a cheap little project and if it doesn't turn out looking clean it's not going on the car. Also doing this as a trial run for paint matching on other projects.

It's not the fact that it's spray paint, it's all in how you apply it. The main thing would be to get automotive grade paint from paintscratch.com or something. Here's a few things I could think of:

-Two things to pearl: lay down pearl in several light coats to match the amount of depth of the pearl, and the distance at which you hold the can determines how light/dark the pearl is so you can match it. Same goes with clear coat. Spray a little farther away and it will lighten up due to more light being refracted from a slightly rougher inner structure of the paint.

-Do NOT blend side skirts into the door. No paint job is ever going to be 100% match, so I'd personally much rather have the line be between two body panels than right in the middle of the door. I had a fender replaced on my MR2 and the shop blended it into the door. Looked like crap. My pearl white audi had the fenders and hood resprayed at one point and they just sprayed the fender and hood and didn't "blend" it into the door and it looks so much better than the MR2 did.

I'm all for DIY. The people that are telling you not to do it are people that are afraid of doing it themselves and screwing it up. I say give it a try and report back to us.

Also, if you have plans to do more paint work in the future, you might just want to look at getting an inexpensive paint gun from Home Depot and getting pints of paint so you have extra down the road. When I painted the whole bottom side of my Audi it cost me like $40 for a Husky HVLP and about $200 in base, pearl, clear, and hardener. This was my first attempt in laying pearl. Ended up putting too much on, but was able to lighten it up by spraying the clear from farther away. Still have enough paint to spray a spoiler or something.

http://i71.photobucket.com/albums/i1...ps447592fd.jpg
http://i71.photobucket.com/albums/i1...ps2bb4b460.jpg
http://i71.photobucket.com/albums/i1...ps597a1a53.jpg

Thanks, when the skirts showed up they were actually so gawdy that I halted this project haha. I got myself some good paint and supplies however. I'll find something to play around with. Looks like your paint job turned out good!

I actually got a scrape on my swp front bumper and lip (all the way to the black plastic). Granted, it wasn't huge, but I managed to quickly/cheaply/easily match it (well, close enough that you'd have to look closely to tell) with a can of white plastidip and glossifier .

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