Hi,
first of all: I am not painting this myself! I took all the parts to a man who is known as maybe THE expert for candy paints here in Germany. He is a specialist for Japanese Candy paints of the 60s and 70s, but also BMW with their sunburst and pearl effekt and so on. He's been working for more than 40 years in his profession and is retired, so he does this only for selected customers to fight the boredom, as he claims
But your assumptions are right. Being a candy paint, the metallic effect comes from the base colour, in this case gold. On top come several layers of a translucent laquer to create the actual colour desired, depending on the number and thickness of the layers. As you can see, it's getting darker with every layer added. This gives the paint much more depth and shine, than just metallic paint, but is harder to do and takes longer.
Most Japanese bikes used a silver base paint and also the blue tones on REs do, so the gold base really is something special.
The primer should be an epoxy type and is also infrared treated to give a better result (better "drying").
The whole paintjob will have taken four months, when it's finished, so waiting is really hard to take
So long,
Andreas