NMM tutorial, covering how to make a silver-finish on armour. MM is short for Non-Metallic-Metal.

It is a technique where you create a metallic feel without using metal colours but instead paint reflections using normal colours. This creates a more shining and clean metal-effect, but it is also difficult to excecute and demands patience and good blending skills to be done effectiveley. Remember that you can click on the pictures to make them larger. 1) The figure has been cleaned and sprayed with GW white primer.

2) GW Shadow grey and Vallejo model colour German Grey have been mixed together to create the colour in the bottom palette picture. The colour is 3 parts German Grey, 5 parts Shadow Grey and 5 parts water. This colour was then applied evenly to figure twice to cover completely.

3) First highlight: This highlight is fairly light. A little GW Skull White is added to the basecolour and this lighter colour is blended in to the basecolour using the feathering-technique. The colour I use is the one that has been circled in the palette picture - and this goes for the rest of the tutorial too. When feathering it is important to thin the colour dramatically, and apply thin layers that almost doesn't cover. You will need to apply the colour several times - because of the poor covering-ability. But exactly because of the poor covering you have a lot of control with the color, because you can see how the colour slowly starts to change and build up. You can create a very smooth blend by using this technique carefully. The trick when creating NMM, is to highlight the grey colours as if they were reflecting something. This is done in this case very simply by not highlighting the edges and 'high' areas' on the figure as you would normally do. Instead I highlight towards the middle of the armour plates and ignore the edges and high places.

4) Second highlight. Again the colour used is the one circled in the palette-picture. And again white was used to lighten the colour. This higlight is more powerfull than the first, as the difference in nuance between the highlight colour and the previous colour is pretty big. At this stage I use two different blending techniques to create a smooth blend. First I feather the new colour onto the area, and then afterwards I retouch and 'tweak' the areas where the highlights have become to powerfull. The colour I use to 'tweak' with is the one I used in the previous highlight, which I have taken care to not let dry up on the palette so that I can use it again. Tweaking is a technique where you use a colour in between two other colours to create a smooth transition between them. For example you could use a normal grey to 'tweak' in between a light grey and a dark grey to create a smooth grading between those two colours. Again - the important thing when tweaking and feathering is to work with very thin colours, and not with very much paint in the brush. This way you can control the colours and apply them gently.

5) More white has been added to create, again, a very powerfull highlight that has been tweaked and feathered onto the figure. Notice that you can begin to see that the highlights is being centered on the middleparts on the armour, but also spreading a little on the edges. But be carefull not to highlight all the edges no matter how much you want to, this will ruin the NMMeffect and just create a grey feel. Not all my blends are perfectly smooth at this stage, but I wait until the last stage to create the last smoothness.

6) Last highlight, using pure white. The white I use is GW Skull White. This stage involves a lot of tweaking and feathering up and down between the previous higlight colour and white. Since it is supposed to look like metal I let this last higlight be rather big and cover much of the armour. This creates a shining feel. You will notice that I have only used 4 different highlightcolours to create a smooth blend from a dark grey all the way to pure white. The reason this is possibly is because I use a lot of time working with the colours at all the stages using tweaking and feathering techniques.

7) last stage. At this stage I have simply blacklined using GW chaos black.

The NMM is now finished.

And as you can see, it is not so complicated as you might think. I hope this has been helpfull.