Non Metallic Metal for Dummies (like me)

today we've got a very special episode of painting with puppies argus here is going to put together this entire kill team box by himself he's super excited [Music] hey again friends i hope you're doing well today today we're going to talk about something pretty exciting today and that's the topic of non-metallic metal or nm it's one of those things that gets a really nasty reputation for being pretty difficult to be able to pull off because of all the details and the sciency bs that's involved in it and i've wanted to do this video for well over a year but i took my time and refined my process so i could get down just the really important things that make non-metallic look good and throw away everything else but when games workshop sent me over this brand new kill team nak mooned nachmund nakamund nakamonde nukamakadunde however you pronounce it inside this box are some amazing eldar void scarred models and i knew that today was the day we tackle this so let's paint up one of these guys in a badass burnished steel paint scheme that not only is easy to pull off with some basic understanding of how light interacts with metal but also can be done quick enough that it will only take you a few hours even on your very first try and before we even begin putting paint on the model there is a mindset to this paint job i need you to trust me on blending isn't important because smooth blending is not what makes metal look like metal to our human eyes so we could spend hours and hours making every surface on this steel armor look perfectly smooth and it would still not look like metal if we don't do these other things right what matters is consistent placement and intensity of light throughout the piece and if we can pull that off our eye will read it as metal once you get the hang of this you can use it to knock out your whole kill team in very little time at all and you can grow and refine your technique until you reach michael pisarski metallic god status alright with that out of the way we can now just dig into the painting for this steel armor i'm basically only using three colors black white and a desaturated blue you can use a color other than blue if you like but blue is most often used because metals like silver steel and the like do a good job of reflecting the color surrounding them and the most common color reflected is that of the sky which is often some shade of blue i mix my black and blue to create the darkest color i'll be using for the armor i've found it's much easier to work from dark to bright when painting metals and to use a small brush i'm using my size zero monument hobbies sable brush and i'm gently touching the model and creating scratches and lines and imperfections to paint most of the armor and most is the key word here this is not an all-over base coat we're making sure that we cover everything perfectly in fact it's fine if certain sections of the model are remaining pure black if they're in shadow and it's really hard for your brush to even reach them don't paint them because they would be in pure shadow which would stay black and if you don't have a perfectly smooth base coat for this color that's fine those natural imperfections and how much opacity our base color brings here is gonna work for our advantage later this also saves us time as black primer will still be in all of the cracks and recesses so we're never going to need to go back through and panel line or reestablish our darkest shadows if you end up making a mistake and hitting one of these areas with a color that's not black just quickly fix it with your black paint and this is why i use both monument black paint and black primer because they are 100 color matches and finish matches so when i go through to fix something it's going to look the exact same as the primer underneath oh and i've got links down in the video description to all the gear that i use including the brushes and paints today so anything that i use you can go down there and pick up yourself most of it at a nice discount and those are affiliate links so it supports the channel and the reason why i'm not overly concerned about having a smooth opaque coat across all the armor is that light works really weird when it comes to metals it jumps all over the place and some areas are very bright and some areas are less so so i'm just going to let the brush do the work for me i'll let it just lightly dance across the model in areas that seem to be more opaque or seem to be more transparent will naturally feel to my eye like light was catching that surface slightly differently and i didn't have to work or understand science to make it happen so i'm just checking and yep over half of you that are watching this video right now are not subscribed to my channel and that makes me sad in the soul a little bit so now remember when i said that we're only going to focus on the most vital areas that sell metal as metal to our eyes here's a very important one light angle if lit from above by the sun or the lights in your house most objects are brightest in the areas closest to the light source and they get darker as they move farther away but anything reflective like metal doesn't work that way the brightest point will actually be at the angle where your eye as the viewer lines up with the reflection point off the metallic surface yeah that's too much science for me we ain't going to do that i'm not busting out a protractor every time i want to paint metals all i do is follow this simple guideline i simply move down the highlight area from the very peak of the surface of our shape and i move it down 30 to 45 degrees so it's slightly off from that point i found that doing this every time seems to work great because when i'm looking at a miniature it's that correct angle from me as the viewer to holding that miniature in my hand i also don't like to put the light angle directly straight on from the model you get a much more dramatic and interesting piece if you set it off to the right or to the left so for this void scarred i'll have the light coming from slightly to his right each time i mix a brighter color for a highlight there are two important things i must do one i must add a little bit of black in the addition to the white as i mix in my new color otherwise our color will simply look more and more like light blue i want that added black so we keep our color desaturated and not looking like pale blue armor and two i make a pretty sizable step up in brightness each time i'll only be doing a total of three highlighting steps here and we need to end it almost pure white at the end so we can't be afraid of making big jumps in making these big jumps in brightness is extremely important to selling metals as metals we're going to have a lot of bright brights and a lot of dark darks in little to no mid-tone in between which is kind of the opposite of the way that we paint just about everything else for our miniatures and this is one of the reasons why people struggle with painting nmm we are so used to working around that mid-tone but here we just went for my darkest shadow the black areas i did not paint and my primary shadow my initial dark blue layer and i jumped right past the mid tone entirely my next paint is a highlight color even brighter than a natural mid tone would be we're continuing our scratchy uneven taps of the brush to create each of these subsequent highlights my attention is solely on getting the paint to where my light angle would dictate focus on the correct light angle and i'm not covering the whole amount of the model that a mid-tone would cover i'm skipping that and just painting inside of where that would be if that makes any sense at all it's better to paint too little rather than too much here and this brings us to one of the most important parts of non-metallic metal and why most of us think we're terrible at it non-metallic metal doesn't look good until the very end so while we're going through these steps we think in our head i must be doing something wrong because this doesn't look right at all and if i was doing it right it would look much better than it does right now no in fact it wouldn't and you are doing it okay so then we stop we get frustrated we say we aren't good enough yet to paint nmm and we give up but i beg you not to give up the nature of pushing up the brightness so quickly and imperfectly will look bad until it doesn't just trust in yourself to make it all the way to the end and even if it's not perfect by going through that entire process you'll have learned some great things and it will get even better on your next try i guess this kind of advice applies for any kind of miniature painting or anything in life really don't give up today's video is brought to us by many worlds tavern the only online coffee shop that gets my hard-earned coppers over the last two years i've developed what's safe to call a coffee addiction and i've tried all sorts 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link down in the video description below will get 10 off your total order so be sure to jump on that deal before they're all used up a big thank you to many worlds tavern for supporting many painting youtubers like i said earlier i'm going for a rough not super shiny steel here which means i need to be more heavy in the darker areas and minimal in the brighter ones now that doesn't mean that my highlights aren't going to be super bright though if you wanted to paint a brighter more reflective metal something like silver or aluminum ain't no armor better than aluminum armor you simply start from a slightly brighter shadow color and then you cover much more of the model in the highlight steps it's kind of like we're using the exact same ratio and lack of mid-tone but we're flipping the ratios of the amount of dark and the amount of light for my next highlight i'm mixing in more white and a bit of pale yellow i've really liked adding in a little bit of this towards the end of my non-metallic metal highlights this gives us just a hint of warmth almost like the light from the sun is giving us a slightly brighter shine and it adds a nice little depth to our color i'm working in smaller and smaller highlight areas in general but don't be afraid to entirely cover the previous layer in some of those areas if you think they would catch a lot of light we really need parts of this armor to really gleam and in order to do that we need some really bright areas even if that means we're going to go from our shadow straight up to basically off-white this step is also where i actually stop highlighting certain areas of the armor areas like his whole right leg that's kind of pushed back behind him and mostly in shadow as well as his upper left arm that's being covered by that pauldron and for our final highlight we're working with an almost pure white with just a hint of that pale yellow showing the focus of this step is to hit those edges in small points that would reflect pure bright light and i mostly just dot the model for this stage because we don't want to overpower the work we've done thus far and these brightest points should be very potent but very few now we're almost done painting this non-metallic armor but there's one extremely important and extremely simple step we still need to pull off but for reasons you're going to understand later we're going to do this part at the very end for now we're going to quickly show how to do non-metallic gold and all this filigree on his armor bronze copper gold and the like all follow the same light guidelines as silver so once you learn how to do one of them you can kind of do them all but there is a major difference and that is in the colors used for these metals need to be much more saturated than silver so we do need to make sure we pick the right colors for the job i like a deep mahogany color as my darkest shadow and then move up to a warm golden brown and my final highlight is with a warm yellow again we need to keep in mind the angle of the light and push that up very bright very quickly one tough thing is making the highest highlights bright enough with our pure warm yellow and as you can see here i didn't quite get there yet i do go back and mix in a pale yellow with my warm yellow for those final edge highlights and dots which i apparently forgot to film so if you look at the mini for the next steps that are coming up you'll see the gold looks better than it does right now because i didn't show you but trust me i did it and now that i've got all my color on the armor i get to start thinking about what i want to do with the rest of this color scheme and i do like how on the box art they have the blue contrasted with the orange even though my blue doesn't look bright and turquoise like this and my orange is not going to be this caution cone color orange here i like more of a burnt sienna almost a rusty burnt orange color and it feels like it's going to be proper grim dark for my voice guard because if you're wearing these big stupid cone helmets the last thing you want to do to look like a badass is paint them traffic cone orange after a quick wet blend i come back in with my small brush and build up highlights in a couple of layers of cross hatching since i'm not going for a smooth blend over the armor i figured i'd show a quick way to highlight capes without worrying about perfect blends either but if you did want to learn all about blending including how i did the wet blending here you can check out the video in the top right corner to learn all about the easy ways to maximize your blending potential [Music] [Music] and we're going to knock out some of the final details of this model like how to do the quick and scratchy leathers and a easy and painless way to paint black nmm on the rifle i'm going to take a moment to give a massive thank you to all the newest samurai and shoguns of the ninja on patreon support of the folks on the screen right now is absolutely the reason why i'm able to commit my time effort and focus on making videos like this one and it's amazing to get to know each of them on discord chat about painting projects and get awesome video ideas from them so if you find any value in my videos and you'd like to support me in making them there's no better way than patreon check out the link below and see some of the cool rewards you get for entering the ninja dojo [Music] [Applause] [Music] this nmm black rifle was really fun to do it took me like two minutes all it is is the same basic processes as we did for the armor and you may think that didn't look at all like how we did the armor the thing is if you're gonna paint something that's really dark basically black and yet shiny it still needs to have those shiny edges so all we did was do a couple layers of basic edge highlights and little spot dots at the end and there we go boom you want an easy army prime it all black do some edge highlights bam black armor easy mode alright on to the last most important final cherry on top that makes non-metallic metal read as metal and that is bounce reflections and some of you may have noticed that up to this point we really haven't been painting much of the bottom half of any surface on our voice guard here but we're gonna remedy that now i painted my base with a few thin washes of red oxide to give us the understanding of the color of the environment that this armor would be reflecting and then all i do is thin down that same red oxide color to a heavy glaze consistency it's important that we don't want this super bright and saturated and this chimera paint is blow your socks off bright so you need to be careful if you're using this color the reflection colors in general need to be more dulled down because our armor isn't super reflective if we are painting chrome armor that was highly highly reflective this would be a much different story and these reflections would be much brighter all i do is follow the natural curve of the underside of each part of the armor that is facing downward the brightest part of this color should be the portion of the armor closest to the ground as it would catch more of that bounce light why these reflections are so important even if they're faint is because it creates the full depth of our figure he now feels like he has shape volume and weight also it's not hard to pull off and it makes you really look like you know what you're doing even if you don't because i sure as hell don't and with that our non-metallic metal void scarred aldar conehead man of doom is done in just over three hours start to finish for this full paint job no less and i'm saying that now because i often forget to say how long something took me in the video and then people put down in the comments how long did this take you so now please don't put that because i answered it and i know you didn't watch the whole video and you're probably not even subscribed and you know what i'm pretty confident you can do this you can pull this off this is not rocket surgery here really if you just see it through from start to finish and say no matter what even if i think this looks like crap i'm going to paint this stuff as metal by the time you get to the end you're going to be surprised and you're going to learn stuff along the way so if you'd end up doing a whole unit with these you're going to get really good with it by the end thanks for hanging out with me today i had a lot of fun which is weird because i was just here by myself so i hope you had some fun by yourself watching me by myself but uh i guess until the next time i see you by yourself and i'm by myself once you get out there and slay the gray oh god did you fart oh god be so heavy okay okay get down why are my glasses so dirty what are these called voids guard whatever this box with the awesome eldar void scarred installed installed they installed it in here like a nos booster

Channel: Ninjon

Views: 184,587

Keywords: nmm, non metallic metal, nonmetallic metal, painting metal, warhammer, warhammer metal, powersword, warhammer 40k, warhammer 40000, age of sigmar, painting warhammer, painting age of sigmar, warhammer kill team, eldar, painting 40k, painting warhammer 40k, army painting, speed painting, painting metallics, warhammer box art, warhammer paint, games workshop, squidmar miniatures, midwinter minis, miniac, how to paint miniatures, painting minis, beginner miniature painting

Id: RA1G0vVu-ww

Length: 20min 15sec (1215 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 18 2022