 Welcome to another episode of Myth Busting with Vince and Trevairian. This week we tackle is non-metallic metal, or NMM, better than true metallic metal, or TMM. I think the common myth here is that, and this is especially true as you begin to learn how to paint and as you start growing and learning more about the art world and about miniature painting in general, is that non-metallic metal is a superior way, a superior technique over true metallic metal. Oh, I see, we're doing the hard-hitting ones right in the first season. But what does it mean in the painting world if something is better than something else? Because how are we going to measure that, right? Whenever we do something creative, it's something we want to do. If we were trying to do, say, the most realistic, then we would all be doing scale modeling and not miniature painting. Of course that is an option too, but I guess it would be half the fun if everyone just tried to recreate the same historically accurate or, you know, in the setting accurate type of thing if we were talking about science fiction, right? So right off the bat I would say you should be doing whatever you find more interesting and whatever you have the most fun with. Now that is easily said and ultimately there is different properties and different strengths and weaknesses to either of the techniques. So I think we can get into that also. Travarian's point is well taken here. If you look at scale models, they're absolute enthusiasts of true metallic metals. If you look at your average aircraft or something like that submitted at a scale model event, it's going to be a shiny true metallic metal polished bird. It's not going to be done in some kind of detailed non-metallic metal because it's meant to represent and look like that thing actually did. So in that case, the realism, whatever that means, is interpreted quite differently. So maybe that's where we start. I agree with you better is clearly a myth because that doesn't actually mean anything. But a lot of people have that in their head. So let's get down and talk about individually why you might like one over the other. I think it's interesting because the intuitive idea would be that metallic pigments are the more realistic choice because they reflect light. And if you turn it around or whatever you painted, if you turn that around, then the reflection follows you and it's going to be quote unquote correct from every angle. The strength of non-metallic metal that if you want to create something and you want to have a lot of control over it and you want to have control over where you place the highlights, then non-metallic metal is the way to go. There's always a bit of a critique point that non-metallic metal only looks good from one direction or one angle. And that painters that use non-metallic metal are only painting for the picture. And I'm quite torn on that myself because on one hand it is absolutely true that you can paint a perfect 3D miniature for a 2D picture. And where you can control exactly where the highlights go and everything else and especially the reflections. So from that one angle you basically create an illustration in 3D that you are going to take a picture of and then it's going to end up in 2D. And I know that there's a lot of people that paint like that. For example Michael Pisarski is very deliberate about that. If you ever did a workshop with him, he usually takes a figure and then decides on a viewing angle that the figure is going to end up with and then he does exactly the quote unquote correct light for that situation. On the other hand I disagree with that notion that there is only a way to paint non-metallic metal from one angle. I feel like you can very well produce a non-metallic metal that looks good from many different angles. So once again I think Treverian is exactly right here. You absolutely can have non-metallic that's working from multiple viewing angles. Here up on screen I have Darren Latham's miniature painting blog, I'll put this in the show notes as well in the description. But down here he talks about how he thinks about non-metallic metal and to me this is one of the all time great articles to help you understand the concept and how it can work from multiple angles and it gets right here how he thinks about the 4 light setup. And what this allows him to do is create as you can see multiple lights, secondary lights and reflected lighting sources that overall produce a more realistic image regardless of how you're viewing it and in fact throughout this article and indeed throughout all of the pictures he shares you can look at most of these images from multiple viewing angles and they'll continue to hold up and continue to seem to glint like metal even though they're done in that non-metallic style. Which brings us to an easy critique, the floor of true metallic metal when you're painting with true metal paints is it looks like metal, it's very hard to make metal paints not look like metal. But with non-metallic metal you have to hit a certain skill floor, you have to include the right amount of contrast or whatever, otherwise it just ends up looking like grey paint. Yeah I think that's where a large portion of the critique points or of the people that are saying I don't like non-metallic metal because it doesn't look realistic comes from because often there is people that try to paint non-metallic but don't really have the grasp as you said because they don't put in the right amount of contrast and so on and then it looks almost like a grey just stone and plastic and obviously those people are going to say I painted my army in non-metallic metal and then someone sees it and says oh but that non-metallic metal thing doesn't really look good. Whereas when you just put on a base color of metallics and added a wash then that instantly looks more credible I guess. I think that's exactly right. What we're pointing to here is that there is a lot more bad non-metallic metal out in the world than there is bad true metallic metal almost by necessity. So you have this weird bar that occurs with it and that's what I'm trying to put my finger on right where it goes from like so in true metallic metal the whole bar is it looks like metal and then if you know how to shade it properly and ink it properly and highlight it and you glaze in colors you get up to like really good looking metal at the top. You can get a really good effect out of true metallic. We'll come back to that in a second. But the bar on non-metallic looks very different. The spectrum there at the bottom is like doesn't look like metal at all up to like then you hit some minimum threshold okay looks like metal kind of right or maybe from limited angles or certain pieces or certain shapes up to like looks better than at the very tip top you've got looks better basically than you could achieve with true metallic metal because you have a much finer control over the exact paint the exact light but that's like this top very thin percentage that literally goes beyond anything you can achieve with true metals. What I'm thinking of here is the work of people like Karel Kaniyiv. When you look at a work like this what you see is that what the artist was able to achieve here is something you really couldn't replicate with true metallics because it's almost a canvas painting as the way the lights and the reflections are being captured in map paints. Yeah another thing that I like to say or like to reply when people ask which of the approaches is better is it true metallics or non-metallics then I always say you have to think about what you want to do say you're building a diorama and what is your ultimate goal here do you want the diorama to be placed somewhere where you just can see from one angle and so on which comes which goes back to the the whole non-metallic metal is more controllable and you can direct the view a bit better but I also want to say that you should be aware what mood you want to represent so if you wanted a bit more of a grittier version of your diorama then personally I think you're better off with true metallic metal because especially if you're going to put a lot of weathering on that can be tricky to do with non-metallic metal. It's not impossible and if you have a lot of knowledge about how paint behaves and when to apply which layer of paint then it can look great. What are the situations that demand or would be well aligned let me put it that way to the use of one technique versus the other? So let's start with non-metallic metal maybe. We already said controllability of your light situation. Let's drill into that one real quick controllability I agree with that. Do you think that that matters a great deal because this is what always comes up and if we don't address it we'll get called out for it. Does this come up and mean that non-metallics one of non-metallic metals better uses is something like competition or display painting so you can have that finer level of controllability? I'm not sure you would have to have a real good grasp about non-metallic metal to really pull off something that is going to elevate you over everyone else that paints non-metallic metal and true metallic metal. I'm not buying the whole you have to paint non-metallic metal to win a competition at the same time I don't buy you have to paint true metallic metals to win a Golden Demon. Both of these are not correct in my opinion. I think the other situation where non-metallic becomes really appealing where you want to capture it is when you want to have a lot of different reflected environmental hues be a very strong part of the piece metal paint is always going to feel pretty steely or pretty goldy or whatever the underlying metal you're using is and your ability to integrate colors into true metallic metal it can happen but eventually it will just look like a colored version of metal. That's a very good point so I like to compare that with using gloss varnish over matte varnish because when you're doing competition painting you kind of want to stay away from gloss varnish or anything that paints that become glossy because they create this artificial light this artificial reflection that you cannot control and when you're doing OSL and secondary reflections or ambient reflections like you said you want to show that you understand where it goes in your composition so here is my other place that I think non-metallic really sells well okay and that is anytime you have extremely crisp fresh especially steel okay because the cleaner that sort of thing the more you want to achieve what I mean by this is the more you're trying to achieve something like a chrome look or a polished metal or something like that the farther you're going into that full plate that's been freshly polished and shined it's not on the battlefield you know what I mean but especially steel because steel sort of has this kind of neutral flat mirror like tone that we associate when we're highly polished we associate with mirrors I think the more you're using going into that highly polished gold would also fall into this category when you got that crisp newness you want to capture non-metallic is a great way to capture that crisp newness and it makes perfect sense like you said you can show exactly that you understand how many reflections are in there and that you know something opposite it is going to influence the color but it's also going to be slightly reflected in and distorted and it becomes the perfect way to show how good you are and how much control you have over the brush because what you're doing is you're basically painting an illustration on top of that armor you're not painting an armor well I guess you are but you are painting an illustration of that armor in a certain environment let's talk about where true metallic metal works the best I've got a couple right off the gate I'm interested to get your take on him here's mine one almost any time you're doing an army painting project like you're painting for something that's going to be an army you play with I think true metallic metal is almost always the right choice yes simply because it's faster you and that goes back to something we mentioned if you try to take shortcuts with non-metallic metal it's not going to work and it's going to the weird and plasticky and stone like so you cannot take any shortcuts with non-metallic metal you can take certain shortcuts with metallics and they're still going to look good like the necrons that I painted a while ago I actually thought about that I could do a kill team at least with that approach in reasonable amount of time which usually I can because everything takes too long so that is a good way to use true metallics however that said you can still take an army that you just apply the basic true metallic to and take it to the next level in another step like you can paint these lights that are still reflecting or those shinier areas that you want to reflect on them so you can you know get them bell ready and then invest a lot more time if you want to say pimp your general or whatever I'll give you another one and you kind of mentioned it earlier where I think it just works better and that is extremely weathered metals anytime you have extremely weathered rust in rusty rotten twisted old junkyard metals I think just starting from a base of regular metal paint works better you often don't have much in the way of reflections it's usually more like some dull gray that just has a very slight shine to it maybe one or two very small scratches and reflection points where the sort of rust got cleared away because one piece hit another in the junkyard but for the most part it's more of an experiment in deep grays blacks browns oranges maroons the occasional yellow you know that kind of stuff ends up being I think better when the little bit of metal you can see still feels like dull real metal I agree and when you said that you can play around with scratches I think that's especially potent because when you look at that whole mess from one angle it's it can be a dull surface because the light is not directly going to be reflected in your eyes and then as you turn it around it adds another level of interest of information because when you turn it around suddenly that very small line that you painted is going to reflect light directly into your eyes and then you're going to see whoa okay there's there's additional scratches here where you know all that weathering got scraped away that's just an example for you can for something that you cannot properly do with non-metallic metal because that white line your total reflection is always going to be there so I wanted to pop in here and talk about another place where I feel true metallic really sells and that's on things like the skeleton of an Imperial Knight but really any big machine or engine part or something like this this is an Imperial Knight that I painted some time back and obviously you can tell this was done with true metallic metals and I feel on surfaces like this you know the interior skeleton of the Knight or the patterning around the edge of the armor plates or the engine of a scale model car or something like that true metallic metals just work better and the reason I believe that is because of the sheer number of surfaces and reflections that are caught here so all of this is reinforced with inks and shading and highlights that I did try to place but the metal paint does a lot of work for me as you can see here in the places where it's catching the individual reflections and the lights and as this thing moves around and changes and you look at it different angles each part is still gonna feel metal the idea that you would have to manually highlight the literal thousands of facets and surfaces and angle changes that this big machine has or that an engine has is crazy your if one little piece is out of place if one little highlight is wrong on an angle change your brain is going to subconsciously pick up on it whereas when you're working on something like this and you paint it in true metallic metal it's just going to feel a lot more realistic naturally because all of the facets the surfaces and the changes will naturally reflect the light so this is one of those situations where when you get to something this complex where there's that large number of surfaces the right answer is almost certainly true metallic metal so to sum it up I want to say that there is applications for both you should deliberately decide which fits the application that you have in mind the most like you said terrain obviously is going to always look better with metallics high-end competition painting where you want to show that you campaign these reflections from the surroundings and so on fine you should do that and then there's multiple in between steps and applications where one might be better fit might be a better fit than the other that said you could still say I don't want to do that I prefer something else over you know I prefer non-metallic metal in that situation over true metallic metal and that's fine it's your choice it's your world you should decide what you want to do do what is fun for you I think Trevarian ended on the perfect note there what we know is there is no better no non-metallic metal is not innately better in any way than true metallic metal it's of course absolute myth whether we're talking for competition or for your personal use the reality is these techniques might be aligned better to certain projects you're working on it's good to be intentional and it's good to think about the effect that you want and you want to capture how much time you want to spend and what you wanted to ultimately look like but in the end just as Trevarian said the important part is to paint in a way that you're gonna have fun with and if that means using some bright shiny chrome and get out that chrome paint and if that means putting on lots of layers and a hundred glazes to get the perfect non-metallic metal spread then that's the right choice too but there you go hope you enjoyed this episode of mythbusting as always look for the next episode which will be on Trevarian's channel remember these do go back and forth but you can always hit the playlist which has all of the episodes regardless of the channel right down below so as always thank you very much for watching I very much appreciate it we'll see you next time