 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about non-metallic steel. This is something I've touched on before and we've done a couple videos on but I really want to deep dive on it and break it down into sort of the techniques that are going to make a blade like this shine. There's sort of a back and forth tactic to this that I think is actually the tricky part. We're going to start out actually this blade has one of those sort of like a flat area and then the actual blade edge and so what I'm going to do here at the start is just black out that top area. This is something I'll do often with like axes or halberds or glaives like this basically wherever there's an area that isn't a cutting area it's not actually part of the blade I'll kind of black it out and I'll clean that up later like it's messy but it doesn't need to be anything else then it helps you keep your eyes as to your true reflectiveness and that draws the visual interest of the blade. For our paints today we're going to focus on basically dark sea blue and ice yellow now we're going to use two other paints as you saw from the paint list but most of the work is just these two colors okay so we get a little bit of that dark sea blue on our palette we get a little bit of that ice yellow and what the first thing I'm going to do is just pick some areas that I feel would be dark and some areas I feel would be light and I'm going to sketch in the extremes now your very reasonable first question is well where should those be especially on like a weapon some shapes have very obvious light placements cylinders so if you've ever seen a space marine leg it's because that has very obvious light placements a blade however especially something that's moving at odd angles it can be basically anywhere my advice is as follows break it up have light in interesting places like gathers toward the ends of solid surfaces so like hence the edge of that blade where it curves is where the light should be gathering there would be secondary reflections other places in the blade as a point of fact there's no exact rule set for this but there's a couple of guidelines first off the way that you move your brush is going to have an impact on the final look so in other words you saw how if I move horizontally slicing down that can give it a more beaten weathered look if I go horizontal and go for smoothness I have a more basically clean look so now we're just going to mix some paint I take some of this dark sea blue and just integrate about three different variants with the ice yellow now we got a nice little step of gradations now after my initial values which are just basically does the light and dark look good there I'm going to start fading out the edges to start you know putting a nice layer down we're not really in a glaze yet over both of these right just pushing the colors around we're going to get to the real tricks I know it doesn't look like anything yet we'll get there it's now a little bit darker same thing over the two new edges we just created right and then I'm going to go to my darkest color that's sort of deepest the closest one to the original dark sea blue and then again over both edges and over both edges and what that gives us is that our standard shingles on a rooftop layering of our light source there now I'm using ice yellow instead of white because it's a little bit softer of a color and it's going to have some it's a little warmer and it's going to have some nice effects later on you can also just use white for this if you want okay so here is the bit first of your big pieces of advice one of the biggest mistakes I see people make on non-metallic metal is they make all of the areas of light and dark equal size so it's like little blocks you have a quarter inch of light a quarter inch of dark a quarter inch of light a quarter inch of dark that looks unrealistic you want them to be of varying sizes horizontally along the blade the next thing you want to pay attention to is you don't want them to be blocks you're not building a Tetris game here so you see how I'm extending the light at the top of the blade towards the blades edge and I'm with I'm widening the shadows near the blades recess where it's going to hit the flat okay so it's not it instead of thinking it as you stacking squares of light and dark which is already wrong if they're equal you're actually building triangles and this is the best insight I can give you I promise you if you change to thinking of this in these sorts of light and shadow triangles in your non-metallic metal that alone will step your game up in a huge way okay so you see how the shadow is now becoming more of this recess thing that emanates out and gets thinner as it's pushing up towards the blades edge okay all right now comes the fun part blending it together I wasn't worried too much about getting a smooth blend initially because it doesn't matter it's just really not important I'm also going to go ahead and black out the two hacks that are in his blade just because they're messing with my eyes but now we play the glazing game so using the exact same colors I just used I'm going to slowly glaze I noticed that I my highlights weren't quite strong enough here so I'm integrating a little bit of chimeras the white and some pure ice yellow and building up those highlights but most of what I'm going to do is glaze color transitions together but I want to talk about exactly how I'm going to do that so I start with the deep glaze this is just pure dark sea blue but very very thin this is dirty paint water thin I'm always pulling the color towards the shadow right my brush comes to rest in an existing shadow I'm also always wicking my brush off first before it touches the model when I'm working with the glaze I don't want it to get out of control so now we're getting somewhere yeah here we go so we're introducing a little more of the white to really brighten up that edge and make it feel like a reflection non-metallic metal a lot of people get obsessed with light placement and sometimes that can be important things like spheres and cylinders have a very sort of natural way they read but those are also pretty easy to figure out where the highlights and shadows go unusual shapes or blades and stuff you can kind of just be freewheeling and go wherever you want light can be anywhere it's all around it's bouncing off of every object in the environment it's coming from the Sun from secondary sources but if the reflections are acting in a way we recognize it will ring true to us so here I'm putting an edge line on let me talk about why I'm doing an edge I saw me do one very earlier in the video which I covered up most of okay let me talk about why I'm doing it here even though I'm not done with the blade edge highlighting cells non-metallic metal it is the thing that makes it feel like metal because light gathers along the edges of metal by doing this and putting this in place now it helps me really frame the whole blade in my eye as I continue to glaze and adjust so it's good to do it midway you will have to do it again at the end and that's fine it's going to help you a lot to do it okay now we're gonna take some of that ice yellow and we're gonna take some of that white okay and we are going to work that into a very thin glaze I've often talked before about how light colors are tough to glaze with and that's true but both of these are very pigment rich paints see how light that is this is your perfect glaze consistency so and then what I'm gonna do is before I had glazed down with the dark sea blue and made sure that my brush was stopping in the shadow and depositing the most pigment in the shadows with this I'm doing exactly the opposite I'm glazing over the middle area of the shadow and pulling towards the light with my brush always coming to rest at the high point so I'm depositing the most light there why is so much of this about going back and forth well first off because it's a lot of little adjustments the non-metallic metals about having kind of everything be in this exact right spacing okay but secondly because paint is translucent there's a completely different effect when you have this thin layer of the white glaze going over top of the darker color it pres it presents this sort of almost fuzz defect that can sometimes look chalky in other places but on a blade in non-metallic metal it's actually quite helpful to us it gives the impression of reflection and this sort of fade of the light into the shadows right so I always make a little more light area than I actually want to be bright and you'll see why in just a moment here when we get to the next step okay but you notice how I still have my rough triangles right see how the shadow is basically a little triangle there in the center of the blade and then on that turn it's brighter okay now comes the magic one of the things that makes non-metallic metal look non-metallic is that it should reflect the colors of the environment around it oftentimes with especially with an upward flat facing blade like this that means the blue of the sky so here I've made a very thin glaze out of the lejo model color blue green again look how utterly thin that is this is a filter and again I'm going to I'm not covering everything I'm starting in the middle highlights and pulling toward the shadows my brush again ends the deep shadows where this ultra-thin filter will have almost no effect by glazing in this soft interference color this is what's gonna sell the non-metallic metal I'm still heating the triangle shape and it's going to make it feel like it's impacting the environment and then one more time I'm taking my light very thin glaze and going over the top of it because again I want a little bit of that white interference white buzz on top of the now blue color back and forth back and forth and we get to a nice reflective shiny blade so there you go that's non-metallic steel I'm gonna repeat the same things on the rest of it you'll see those pictures in just a moment give this a like if you liked it subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future if you've got any questions drop them down below but as always thank you so much for watching this one and we'll see you next time