I still don't know if I've found what I've been looking for
The paint scheme for my revamped DeathWing army is giving me fits. I think that a big part of that is due to me trying a completely new technique that I've never done before. That technique is Non-Metallic Metal painting.

I've been interested in the idea of Non-Metallic Metal painting for a while and I decided that I'd roll that into my new DeathWing army. First off, let me give you a quick intro to NMM if you aren't familiar with it.

Non-Metallic Metal painting involves replicating the reflectivity of metal without using metallic paints (such as Chainmail or Boltgun Metal) There are different kinds of NMM, however. The most basic version simply uses gradients of color to duplicate the play of light and shadow on a metal surface. There is a more dramatic technique known as Sky-Earth NMM. This plays on the reflectivity of highly polished metal and paints the surface as if it were like a mirror, reflecting what is in front of it. While you needn't paint every detail of the surrounding terrain, you give the impression of it by painting the sky and the earth onto the surface. The most obvious version of this is in shiny, highly polished Chrome or mirror-like surfaces.

I saw a fantastic model that combined SENMM chrome with a less-shiny Black NMM and I thought I'd adapt it to the Bleached Bone paint scheme of the DeathWing. For the SENMM chrome look, I used a darker blue to represent the sky and a dark brown to represent the earth. You can see the results below, but I wasn't entirely pleased with them.

After looking at this, I added the Skull White highlights on the horizon lines, and a lighter blue at the bottom of the sky reflection and Bubonic Brown at the bottom of the earth reflection. After looking at this, I knew it wasn't enough. I went through the better tutorials and my examples and realized I needed a lot stronger highlights. I put in some strong highlights and gave Skull White highlights on all the sharp edges. It made a big difference. I think for future models I'll use a bit more of the lighter colors.

After this, I decided I was really unhappy with the parts of the model that used the Bleached Bone mix. I'm not sure if they contrasted too much with my Blues or if I just wasn't happy with the way I'd highlighted them. I suspect it was a bit of both. So I pondered changing the paint scheme.

My first thought was to go with Black as the main color instead of a Bleached Bone mix, much like that on the Space Wolf Chaplain I'd gotten the idea from. I thought that perhaps the Bleached Bone mix was too light a color to let the highlighting stand out enough.

I also thought about going with the extreme SENMM look over the entire model, like the Silver Sharks models.

I also considered going for shiny Black NMM or even scrapping the NMM/SENMM idea entirely and simply going for very detailed conventional painting. Ultimately, I decided I'd give the SENMM one more try and focused on the Silver Sharks idea.

I decided to put a fair amount of it on the model to see if it grew on me. I was actually surprised how quickly the base layers went on and how I started getting a better feel for where to put the horizon line.

I'm still not sure that I love it, and I definitely like the look of the Shoulder pad better than the side that I did, but I think I'm getting somewhere. I have two more things to do to it. The first is to do more layering like I started on the shoulder pad put didn't take the time to do on the rest of the model. On most of the model, it's Hawk Turquoise, a thin line of Skull White and then Adeptus Battlegrey, with no gradients between. On the shoulder pad, I tried some wet blending of the Hawk Turquoise and the Skull White. (Paint one color and then another color next to it. Before they dry, use a paintbrush wet with water to run between them, mixing the paint directly on the model. That's Wet Blending in a nutshell.) I've never done Wet Blending before and I had a pretty hard time of it. I'll probably give it a few more tries, but if I still don't like it, I'll switch to Dry Blending. (In Dry Blending, you paint your color on and let it dry. Then you water down your other color by a lot and paint a wide band of it over the previous color, leaving a bit of the original color untouched. There should be very little actual color difference you can see on the model. Once that has completely dried, repeat the process with the watered down paint, making successively smaller layers until you have a smooth progression from one color to the next.) While I don't know that I have the patience for 5-8 layers, even a couple will probably make a big difference.

The other thing that I'll need to do is to paint on the extreme highlights like I did on the first model in Skull White. They really made a big difference on that first model, and I think they'll do the same here. (I just forgot about them since it's been so long since I did the first model. Well, now it's time to get back to work!) Now I need to finish this model and see what I think of the final result, then I can get the rest of the army in gear.

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