The Hobby That Dare's Not Speak Its Name Aka Wargaming

Thank you!

I think the best advice I found was that nmm is more about impression than realism, that if you can create the feel of metal rather than the look of it, you’ll usually sell it.

One noticeable trait is the edges of metal will always light up more than the body of it, so edge highlighting everything is a pretty good rule of thumb, you can spend ages working out light values but for anything not golden demon this will work out fine

Likewise making contrast is usually more important than light placement. Make sure you leave enough of the darkest tones to set against the highlights. If the dark area is too boring you can use micro scratching to break it up with your highlight colours to make different depth scratches

If the metal bends or has a noticeable hard line do a highlight one side and a lowlight the other, try to leave spaces between highlights. If it’s a long edge one large highlight and smaller one further down simulates bounce shadows. On flat areas figure where your imagined light is coming from and topographically layer up the ratios to a highlight point, leaving the rest in shadow

The next is saving pure white highlights only for your metals, this makes them look like the brightest thing on the model, it also sells the eye on texture differences, like if you use dash highlighting for fabrics. When adding this focus on where you’ve placed your highlights and the edges, you can also use it for micro scratches

Then it’s ratios, I base in pure black, then use 3 shades of my target metal, dark, middle, light and I’ll cover 70%/30%/10% darkest to lightest , you can use any colour, all that matters is the shades and ratios.

As for working it in, I’ll glaze to the highpoint then if needs be take the darker colour and reglazing to the dark point, repeated one after the other till smooth as desired, then edging in the penultimate highlight, chip highlight of pure white

Finally you can use accent colours to sell different surfaces, browns for rust, blues for polished steels, greens for verdigris etc, glazing them into shadows or around features of the metal. Just ensure your edge highlight layers over the top of anything you adid. Alternatively laying them down before you build your highlights can work too.