Squidmar is back with a miniature painting tutorial showing us how to paint steel NMM or Non-Metal Metallic armor!
Squidmar’s channel is rapidly growing due to his great tutorials ranging from full-scale models to tips, even to practical physics! This time around Lucas takes over and goes through a ton of tips to make NMM a little easier than you might think.
This goes through everything from OSL to the metal itself, so it’s really awesome to have all these tips! Let’s check it out.
How to Paint Steel Non-Metal Metallic NMM Tutorial
This is the end result we’ll be trying to achieve, while it looks hard, Lucas makes it easy in this tutorial as he shows how to paint Non-Metal Metallic (NMM).
Base Coats
To start, he breaks out the airbrush and does a layer of Terradon Turquoise from the bottom up. He just does this over all the steel.
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Non-Metal Metallic Highlights
Now, we move to the regular brush. He puts all the colors he needs on his wet palette to start. The colors he uses are Fenrisian Grey, Terradon Turquoise, Sunny Skintone, Light Flesh, and Ivory. When working with NMM you want to work with a light source.
Use something like the picture above to manufacture where your light will be coming from.
To start, map out the highlights with the Grey but be sure to paint some scratches and dots in there. Once that is in there, blend with the contrast paints (in this case the turquoise) before it gets too dry.
Then, start adding the lighter and lighter tones into a mix and do smaller and smaller highlights. Just be sure to keep the light source in mind the whole time, so the light will always be coming from the top. Just keep moving up to lighter colors until you are at full 100% light flesh.
OSL
For OSL, the easiest way to understand where to paint is by holding a light from where you want it to come from. So, for this one, they are doing it from the bottom, hence, the light coming from underneath.
He starts with Evil Suns Scarlet and uses the reference from above to decide where the light should come from. Just blocking in all the areas that he wants OSL (Object Source Lighting). After that, he moves to Trollslayer Orange. He covers up almost all the scarlet.
Painting the Gold
The colors he is using for the gold are Rhinox Hide, Scrufulus Brown, Sun Yellow, and Ivory. He follows the same steps as the steel and just makes sure to get really good layers here. He mixes the yellows and browns for all the gold, slowly going lighter and lighter all the way up to ivory.
Then puts the Rhinox Hide into the shadows to give it more contrast. To finish it off and blend it, he uses a Sun Yellow glaze to blend it all together.
Finished Model
Here’s how painting Non-Metal Metallic (NMM) will look at the end of the tutorial with some OSL added in for fun.
Obviously, they went through and painted the rest of it, but you can see just how awesome the armor looks!
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About the Author: Travis Pasch
Travis Pasch
Job Title: Head Writer & Editor
Joined: 2019
Socials: @paschbass
Bio: Dark Eldar Dracon and Warhammer 40k hobbyist since the third edition in 1998. He also loves camping because you can only paint so much! He joined the Spikey Bits team in 2019 and has been the main daily writer since 2020. Maybe one day, he’ll finish converting all his Ad Mech models and turn into a true tech enjoyer, complete with sad and happy robot noises!
