Experimenting with NMM

On the heels of my visit to Germany to savor the Duke of Bavaria show and indulge in my coaching sessions with Raffaele Picca, I am hungry to begin about a half-dozen display-quality projects in preparation for NOVA Open.

However...

I have a few tabletop projects on my desk that I need to finish first.  One of these projects is an orc unit that I began over 5 years ago!  It has languished at about the 70% mark for most of that time.  The plan back then was to use these cruder models on which to practice, before I committed my more valuable models to the brush.  I wanted to test skin colors, contrasts, paint-techniques, and color-theme, in order to have a more polished style in preparation for my more favored orc models.

Revisiting my tabletop paint techniques from 5 years ago is an abrupt turnabout, when I'm so eager to exercise my newer techniques.  My old wash technique is pretty rough, compared to the standard I want to meet now!

So, instead of reworking the models to a higher standard, I decided I would use the project to experiment with different approaches to non-metallic metal (NMM) -- in order to gain more practice with it and to compare different techniques for it.

Here, you can see the different methods that I tried on the dagger hilts and scabbards.  I tried different colors, different gradient directions, different contrasts, different transition proportions, etc.  There's one true metallic metal (TMM) in there, too (can you tell which one it is?).

This was a useful experiment.  At the end of the day, there are only about 2 versions that I would repeat going forward.  Good thing that I learned what not to do on miniatures where these features will never be noticed!

Oh, by the way, there are again 17 more orcs where these guys came from!  I'm making some movement trays to use these guys in Kings of War and in Mini Mayhem.