Flakes, tricky.....

To do it the CORRECT way requires a lot of clear. But ive gotten by with doing the following steps.

Do you normal sealer and base spraying. When adding flake and using a gravity gun, you want to make sure to shake the gun up randomly that way you dont apply heavy coats of flake in one general area. I sprayed my first coat of clear with flake and decided it needed more. So i did a second coat. (a normal paint job only needs 1-2 coats anyway, but you will use more when using flake) After my second coat i felt that it looked fine. So the last step i wanted to do was add 2 more additional coats WITHOUT any flake in it. This is very important. If you have flake in your final coat, when you go to wet sand it (especially if your using a colored flake) you will wet sand the color right off each individual flake. So lets say your spraying a blue flake, when you wet sand it, your going to have silver and blue flakes. Each flake is actually a dull silver color until the shiny layer is applyed to it.

Give your paint at least 2 days to cure really good. The clear coat tends to want to shrink around the flake which will result in a dull clear coat finish so you want to give it time. Then do the steps i posted above. (wet sanding, etc etc) Everyone has their own techniques. Thats just how i've done them in the past.