The Shining
In case you haven't noticed, I've been fascinated by Non-Metallic Metal painting techniques for a while. I'm interested in improving my painting, and NMM is a technique that most of the best painters use. A particular subset of NMM, Sky-Earth NMM caught my eye, being the shiniest, chrome reflection sort of look. I've attempted it on a couple of occasions, and I've come close, but I haven't quite been happy with my results.

This was one of my first attempts at it. I was actually attempting both SENMM and the less-shiny version, based on a cool model I'd seen online. I didn't quite succeed at either, but I came moderately close.

This was my second attempt, this time at SENMM for the whole model. Again, I didn't quite make it, but I definitely felt closer. At this point, I gave up on using SENMM for my DeathWing army.

A couple of weeks ago, Warpstorm reader Max Wozniak (hi, Max!) sent me a tutorial on SENMM. It was very well put together and gave me new hope. I'll go ahead and post the tutorial he sent me below. Warning, it's all in one very, very large picture!

I followed the directions, and I was generally pleased with the result, but I realized that I wanted more blue in my sky. I decided to try the same steps, but substituted Ice Blue for Space Wolves Grey. (Space Wolves Grey looks more like typical skies in the Seattle area, but I wanted a nicer blue sky.) I then used watered-down Skull White in place of the step that previously used Ice Blue. On the smaller areas of the model, I used a few less steps (not as many browns, not as much blending, etc.)

This is the final result. It's significantly closer to my goal, but it still doesn't match the ideal in my head. I definitely feel that I learned something, and I'll come back to it another time to try again.

In a way, it not being perfect is a bit of a relief, as I've got most of my DeathWing painted already and I didn't really want to repaint them! This is definitely the best SENMM tutorial I've seen so far, and Max has offered to send me some more tutorials, so if you liked it, keep your eye out for more.

If you enjoyed this, email me and let me know

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