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So over the past week or so I've been working on getting a non-metallic metal finish on a Space Marine's Aquila down. I've been progressing, but have begun hitting the point where I'm becoming unsure of my work.

My first attempt was I think decent, incredibly rough up close but from afar I think it could manage to look decent.



My second attempts tried to clean it up closer up but



It got harder edges between the yellow and brown that made it look like crap. So I did it again and eventually ended up at this.



I think the paint work itself is better than my other attempts but at some point I lost my way while looking through guides on this and such. So I'm trying to figure out where I went wrong on this one.

so your goal on that part of the model is easy when compared to most nmm. generally speaking the hardest part about nmm is figuring out where/how to apply the lighting

with that eagle you're going to want to have a dark line under each feather and work your way out towards the edge like you are doing eventually ending in white or almost white.

some pointers i guess?

- you need a darker color in the recesses. you should tell us your colors and recipe you are using

- you also need to decide if you want a more yellowish nmm or not. if you look up gw's "gaunt summoner" its an example of a nmm gold without yellow

I found this less than stellar example blending wise but it demonstrates what you kinda are aiming for
http://www.miniwargaming.com/content/nmm-gold-assault-space-marine

notice how he has a very dark line in each feather and there are various points that he blends towarsd the final color of white. on the eagle head/body you will have to decide where you want these points to be and blend them towards that location or just make the inside of the bird dark and blend out towards the edges


if you need some close up pics or whatever I could try and find a space marine eagle and do some step by step if you want. I just posted my latest model which has a ton of NMM on it if you want some ref

I've made a little image to help explain NMM, and to some extent, highlighting in general. While we don't generally think of surfaces like paper, skin and cloth as being "reflective", light does reflect off them and into our eye, otherwise we wouldn't be able to see them at all. What makes them different to reflective surfaces like mirrors, is the way that the light is blurred and scattered. You might be surprised just how reflective things like paper can be (especially when it comes to coloured light). Many metals are somewhere in between, they are reflective but we can only make out blurry shapes and streaks of light. The following pictures illustrate how this works, and how we might paint it. In almost all cases we want a dark area reflecting the ground, a lighter area reflecting the sky, and a highlight reflecting the sun (or another point of light). The amount of blurriness and tint is what defines the material.




While this might be not be super helpful for painting chest eagles (given their complexity), it should still be useful for helping you to understand where the light and dark areas fall.

Have a look at this suit of armour, and you can see the reflections in action:

That is really helpful smacks, do you think you could do the same NMM colours on the concave/convex and cylinders please?

EDIT: Okay I added some nmm/gold convex/concave and cylinders to my first post

But you shouldn't copy what I have done directly, the idea is to think about what direction each surface you are painting is facing, and what it might reflect, and how it would distort. Concave areas show the same thing upside down because the top part of the "cave" faces the ground, so it reflects the ground. Like this...



Cylinders nearly always stretch reflections out into very long lines that run along the cylinder. Always along cylinders, never across.

If you stand close enough to a concave reflector it won't flip the reflection, it'll magnify it (if you stand between the focal point and the mirror).

But for sharply curving concave stuff, yeah, it'll pretty much always flip the reflection because the focal point is so close to the reflector that you can't get between the two. For gently curving concave surfaces they'll magnify stuff though. I guess for the purposes of miniatures that are so small and the "observer" is always far away, you could probably just assume they all flip the image, but the more concave it is, the smaller the reflection will be.

Part of the reason I have never gotten on the NMM train is because reflections depend not only on the model position and the light position, but also the observer position, the lack of that dynamic in NMM has always made them look off to my eye.

My latest attempt. Think it looks far better as I got out a smaller brush and actually tried to get each individual feather on it.

I think what I need to do is expand the yellow closer to the inside. Possibly edge highlight each feather.

yes thats exactly it. the very tip and a tad bit of the bottom end of the feather can be white or almost white.

I like to glaze yellow over white to blend my yellow into my gold nmm. I do this by basically blending my brown/yellow mix to white and then glaze yellow over it and further blend white to the end.

yellows a hard color due to pigment to get really showing. Glazing it over whites the only way I've found to get it to pop in the areas i want

better pics would help. try not holding the camera/phone and model. also google light box. can make one rather cheaply