A lot of people use metallic paints when painting things such as swords and helmets. This can look quite good if the metallics are shaded and highlighted proporly. It's also a pretty quick method and therefore very good for painting armies. For display models I prefer to use Non Metallic Metal (NNM) techniques. When painting NMM style you use "ordinary" non metallic paints to simulate the way metallic objects shine.
In this tutorial I'm gonna (try to) explain how I paint Steel, Gold, Bronze and Sky-Earth NMM.
For steel NMM I use the following colours:
GW:
- Skull White
Foundry:
- Charcoal
- Charcoal Light
- Arctic Grey Shade
- Arctic Grey
If you only have GW colours, you can use Codex Grey mixed with a little black, Codew Grey, Fortress Grey and Skull White.
When painting NMM you can't just highligths as usual (lightest colours on the highest points). You have to think about how real metal would reflect light. When painting a NMM sword I usually place the colours as shown in the pic:
I don't always use the darkest shade (Charcoal Black), but I always highlight up to pure white to represent the metal's reflectiveness.
For NMM gold I use the following colours:
GW:
- Snakebite Leather
- Skull White
Foundry
- Lemon Shade
- Lemon Light.
If you only have GW paints you can use yellow mixed with Snakebite Leather instead of Lemon Shade and yellow mixed with White instead of Lemon light.
The picture shows where I place the colours.
I've only tried NMM bronze a couple of times so take this with a grain of salt. For Bronze I only use:
GW
- Vermin Brown
- Skull White
I just blend from Vermin Brown to Skull White as shown in the pic.
If I want a more worn bronze look, I shade with thin glazes of green and black.
Sky-Earth NMM is used to paint highly reflective metallic surfaces. Stuff that looks like chrome..... Metal like that will work like a mirror and reflect the horizon.
I believe the first person to use Sky-Earth NMM in mini-painting was Honza Skypale. He also wrote an excellent tutorial on the subject.
When I paint SE NMM I use the same colours as for normal NMM, the only exception is gold SE NMM: Here I use GW's scorched brown as my darkest colour (on the horizon). The pictures shows where the colours are used.
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