NNM made easy

The recipe for steel, metal NNM is often given as basecoat with grey. Then add white and blend smoothly up to almost pure white.Finally, add a spot of pure white at the highest point. Hoever, there it is often not explained as to how to actually go about doing it. Also, I find just blending grey to white do not give good realistic NNM. There was an article posted previously showing a katana and the actual colours being reflected. Although it is very informative, I find it very hard to apply to actual painting on minis with that amount of different shade, especially on more complicated surfaces. In this demostration, I will be using a slightly curved sword, but the same technique can be applied to a curved or straight blade. I start by priming the blade white. After priming, I paint the area with VMC Dark Seagreen 163. Next we got to determind where the light is coming from, how is it going to be reflected off the blade and the brightest spot. There are various ways of doing this. I'll named it as "I" and "Z". The 1st method is to paint a letter "I" on the brightest spot and the later a "Z". I often use the 1st methode on a curved surface eg. rings and barrel hoops( pic below). The 2nd method is often used for flat surfaces. For this sword, I'll be using the "Z" method. I start by mixing 50/50 VMC Dark Seagreen/white. Thin it down to milk like and paint a "Z" on the spot where you want the brightest part to be.Drag the brush along the edges also. Next take out some white and mix in some of that 50/50 paint. Water this down again. This will be almost white. again repeat the above procedures but this time a smaller "Z" within that "Z" you painted before. Finally, water down some white and with a clean fast stroke paint a white / in the middle. You can actually stop here but if you want to take it further then continue reading this tutorial. We can see that simply by using grey and white, the result is not realistic enough and the blending looks harsh. This is what I found out after some experiments. Water down some Citadel colour (Hedious Blue) and glaze it between the grey and the 1st "/" you painted. I find that this colour will blend more smoothly into the grey and white. From here, water down some Dark Seagrey and paint in the areas where the darkest areas are. In this case we can paint in the shadow just by painting over the area with the base colour. You can then add rust and dents to further enhance the look but I will not touch on those since there are very good articles explaining how to do those. I hope this is helpful to those who are eager to start doing some NNM and those who are still experimenting. With some practice, this can be done in 20-30 mins, maybe less. I'm doing a rush job here so the blendings isn't that smooth. Here are some of the examples which I used this method.