Non-Metallic Metal: A Practical NMM Guide for Resin Figure Kits

Non-metallic metal, almost always shortened to NMM, is the technique of painting something so that it reads as polished steel, gold or copper without using any metallic paint at all. Every highlight, every reflection and every dark bounce is painted by hand with ordinary matte colours. Done well it looks like a photograph of chrome. Done badly it looks like grey.

This guide is written for people painting resin figure kits, which is a slightly different problem from painting rank and file wargaming models. Display kits are bigger, they are looked at from closer, and they are usually looked at under one light rather than carried around a table. Those three facts change almost every decision below.

Remerlinds makes unpainted resin figure kits, printed to order in the Netherlands. Every kit on the site arrives unpainted, so anything in this guide is something you would do yourself after the box arrives. There is a section further down listing the kits in the range that actually suit the technique, because NMM needs large readable metal surfaces and not every sculpt has them.

What Non-Metallic Metal Actually Is

Metallic paint contains reflective particles suspended in the medium. Those particles catch real light from whatever direction it happens to arrive, which is why a metallic-painted sword changes appearance as you turn it. NMM contains nothing reflective. It is flat paint arranged so that the pattern of light and dark on the surface matches what a reflective object would produce under a fixed light.

The consequence is worth stating plainly, because it is the single thing most people miss. With NMM you are not painting the object. You are painting the reflection of the room in the object. A steel blade is not grey. A steel blade is a mirror that happens to be blade-shaped, and what you see in it is the dark floor, the bright ceiling, the horizon between them, and a hot spot where the lamp is.

That is why NMM looks wrong when it is painted as shading. Shading is soft, gradual and follows the form. Reflection is hard, abrupt, and follows the light. A gentle gradient down a sword makes the sword look like painted plastic. A sharp jump from near-white to near-black across the same distance makes it look like metal.

Key takeaways:

• NMM uses no metallic pigment at all, only matte colour.
• You are painting a reflection, not a surface.
• Hard transitions read as metal, soft transitions read as plastic.

Why It Works Better on Display Kits Than on Table Miniatures

NMM has a reputation for being difficult. Most of that reputation was earned on small wargaming figures, where the technique genuinely is hard, and for a reason that has nothing to do with skill.

NMM is a fixed painting. It assumes one light, from one direction, seen from one angle. A figure sitting on a shelf under a lamp satisfies all three assumptions permanently. A figure being moved around a table under overhead room lighting satisfies none of them, so the painted reflection constantly disagrees with the real light and the illusion breaks.

Size compounds it. A blade on a 28mm figure might be two millimetres wide, which leaves room for perhaps three distinguishable values. The same blade on a 1/7 scale kit can be a centimetre wide and hold seven or eight. The technique needs room to place its transitions, and display kits have room.

If you have tried NMM before on small figures and given up, try it again on something large. It is a different experience.

The One Thing NMM Depends On: Value Range

If you take nothing else from this guide, take this. NMM succeeds or fails on how far apart your lightest light and your darkest dark are. Not on colour choice, not on brush control, not on blending smoothness. Value range.

Real polished metal produces an extreme range because it is reflecting both the brightest and the darkest things in the room simultaneously, within a few millimetres of each other. Matte materials never do this. Cloth reflects a narrow band. Skin reflects a narrow band. Metal reflects nearly the whole band available.

So when someone paints metal and it reads as grey, the diagnosis is almost always that the range was too narrow. They painted from a middle grey up to a light grey and down to a dark grey, which is a perfectly reasonable range for a wool cloak and completely wrong for a sword.

Push it further than feels comfortable. Your darkest value should be close to black and your brightest should be close to white, and both should appear on the same blade, and they should be near each other. If it looks overdone on the palette it is probably about right on the figure.

The other half of the same rule is that the steps between values should be visible. A ladder of seven or eight distinct values that you can name is easier to control and looks more convincingly metallic than a perfectly smooth gradient, because a smooth gradient is what a matte curved surface does and a stepped, interrupted pattern is what a reflection does.

Key takeaways:

• Range matters more than blending, colour or brush skill.
• Near-black and near-white belong on the same piece of metal.
• Distinct steps beat a smooth gradient.

Decide Where the Light Comes From Before You Mix Anything

This is the step people skip, and skipping it is why a figure can be technically well painted and still look confused.

Pick a light source and write it down. The usual choice is high and slightly in front, roughly where a ceiling lamp would sit if the figure were standing in a room. Once you have picked it, every metal surface on the figure has to agree with it. The pauldron on the lit side gets bright upper planes. The pauldron on the other side does not, no matter how much you would like to show off the gradient you just mixed.

Consistency across the whole figure is what sells the illusion. A single sword painted beautifully but lit from the wrong side will fight everything else on the model. It is worth putting a small sticky note on the front of your painting handle with an arrow on it.

Two related decisions belong here as well. Decide how high the horizon sits, because that is where the sharpest dark-to-light break falls on flat metal. And decide whether the ground is dark or light, because the lower part of every reflective surface is showing you the ground.

Steel, Gold and Copper Are the Same Method

Beginners often treat gold NMM as a separate and harder technique. It is not. It is the steel recipe with the mid-range shifted into a warm hue, and the ends left more or less where they were.

Build the ladder first in neutral values, then tint the middle. For steel you might cool the shadows slightly with a touch of blue and leave the highlights near-white. For gold you warm the middle values into a yellow-brown, keep the deepest shadow a desaturated brown rather than a pure black, and keep the spot highlight almost white. For copper you do the same but push the middle towards orange-red. For brass, sit between gold and steel.

The mistake to avoid with gold is painting it yellow all the way to the top. A gold highlight is not yellow. It is a very pale, almost colourless bright, because a specular highlight takes the colour of the light source rather than the colour of the object. Yellow at the top of the ladder produces something that looks like mustard.

The same logic applies at the bottom. A gold shadow that is pure black kills the warmth. Keep a trace of brown in it.

Key takeaways:

• Build a neutral value ladder first, then shift the middle towards the hue you want.
• Highlights take the colour of the light, not the colour of the metal.
• Keep shadows tinted rather than pure black on warm metals.

A Worked Pass on a Sword Blade

A flat blade is the best place to learn, because the geometry is simple and the result is very readable.

Start with the blade blocked in at your middle value across its whole length. Do not shade it yet.

Next, decide where the horizon line crosses the blade. On a blade held upright with the light above, the upper portion of each face is reflecting bright ceiling and the lower portion is reflecting dark floor, and the change between them is abrupt. Paint the lower portion down towards your darkest value and the upper portion up towards your lightest, and let the two meet in a line rather than a fade. That single hard line is doing more work than any amount of subsequent blending.

Then place the spot highlight. This is a small area, near white, positioned where the light would strike most directly, usually near the top third of the blade and near the edge that faces the light. It should be small. If it covers a large fraction of the blade it stops reading as a highlight and starts reading as a light-coloured object.

Then place a second bright at the very tip and along the sharpened edge, as a thin line. Edges catch light disproportionately and painting them is what makes the blade look sharp.

Only now do you soften. Go back and glaze thinned midtones over the hardest boundaries to take the edge off where it looks too abrupt, but leave the horizon line mostly alone. Most people over-soften, and the cure is to stop one step earlier than you want to.

Finally, look at the blade from arm's length under the lamp you plan to display it under. Squint. If the pattern of light and dark still reads clearly when the detail disappears, the blade is working. If it turns into an even grey shape, go back and widen the range.

Curved Armour Is Not a Flat Blade

Plate armour is where most figures live, and curved plate behaves differently from a flat blade in one important way. On a curve, the reflection compresses.

Picture a pauldron as a section of a sphere. The horizon between bright sky and dark ground still exists, but instead of crossing the surface as a straight line it wraps around it, and near the edges of the curve the whole reflected world gets squeezed into a narrow band. The practical result is that the value transitions get closer together as the surface turns away from you, and they get tighter still right at the rim.

So on a rounded pauldron you typically end up with a bright band across the upper curve, a rapid drop through the middle, a dark lower area, and then a surprising bright line right at the bottom edge where the surface curves far enough to start catching light bouncing up from below. That bottom edge bright is one of the most convincing details in the whole technique and it is the one most often left out.

Panel breaks help you enormously here. Where armour is divided into separate plates, each plate is at a slightly different angle, and so each plate gets its own version of the ladder. Nudging adjacent plates a step or two apart in value makes the armour look assembled rather than moulded. On a well-sculpted resin kit those panel breaks are already there in the surface, which is most of the reason large display kits are pleasant to paint this way.

Chainmail, Rivets and the Small Metal

Not all metal on a figure is big enough to hold a ladder. Chainmail, buckles, rivets, chain links and studs need a different approach, because there is no room for seven values on a rivet.

For chainmail, treat the whole area as one surface rather than as hundreds of individual rings. Give the area a mid value, shade it as a mass according to your light direction, and then pick out a scatter of individual rings with a near-white dot, concentrated where the light would fall. Do not highlight every ring. Chainmail reads as metal because of the random sparkle across a shaded mass, not because each ring is rendered.

For rivets and studs, two values is often all you get. A dark base and a bright dot at the top, placed consistently with the light direction. Consistency is what matters. Twenty rivets with their highlights all at the same clock position looks like metal. Twenty rivets highlighted at random looks like a rash.

For thin chains and hanging metal, run a bright line along the top of the chain and leave the underside dark. It is fast and it works.

Get the Surface Right First

NMM is unforgiving of texture, more so than almost any other technique, because a real polished surface has none. A scratch that would vanish under a coat of matte cloth colour will sit in the middle of your blade and catch the eye permanently.

A 3D printed resin part has no mould lines, because it never touched a mould. There is no flash, no casting seam and no vent to trim. What you may find instead are support marks, small raised or flattened points on undersides and hidden faces where the printing supports were attached. On the kits here those supports are already removed, the parts are washed and fully UV cured, test fitted and inspected, and every part is bagged separately.

What that leaves you is a light sanding pass on any support marks that fall on a surface you intend to paint as metal. Work up through progressively finer grits until the surface reflects evenly, and check by holding the part under a lamp and tilting it. Flaws show under raking light long before they show under flat light.

Then prime, thinly, and let it cure properly before you paint. A thick primer coat softens exactly the crisp panel edges you were about to use, and a primer that has not fully cured will lift when you start glazing over it. Priming in a mid grey gives you a neutral starting point that makes value judgement easier, and priming from directly above in white over a dark base, which is usually called a zenithal pass, effectively sketches your light direction onto the model before you begin. That is a genuinely useful head start for NMM.

The assembly and finishing guide covers the preparation steps in more depth, including what to do about tight joints and visible seams between parts.

What Your Finish Level Changes

Remerlinds sells every kit at three finish levels, and the choice genuinely affects how you approach NMM.

Finish level	What arrives	What it means for NMM
Bronze	DIY Ready. Supports removed, washed and cured, quality checked. You sand, fill and prime.	You control the surface completely, and you carry the whole burden of getting it smooth enough. Usually ships in 2 to 5 business days.
Silver	Detail Ready. Bronze plus support marks sanded and visible holes filled.	The most common choice. The surface work that matters most for metal is already done and you prime it yourself. Usually ships in 4 to 8 business days.
Gold	Paint Ready. Silver plus all gaps filled and primed in your colour.	You skip straight to blocking in values. Choosing a mid grey primer sets up NMM well. Usually ships in 6 to 14 business days.

Gold arriving already primed is worth thinking about before you order rather than after. If you were planning a zenithal pass, you would be doing it over the supplied primer rather than instead of it, which is fine but changes the order of operations. If you have a strong preference about primer brand or finish, Silver leaves that entirely in your hands.

None of the levels arrive painted. Every kit ships unpainted, at every price.

Kits in the Range That Actually Suit NMM

NMM needs surface area. A sculpt with a thin dagger and a belt buckle will not teach you much. The kits below were chosen because they carry large, readable expanses of metal, and they cover a useful spread of budget and difficulty. Prices shown are the Bronze finish level at the time of writing, and the product page is always the authority.

Kit	Scale and height	Sculptor	From	Why it suits NMM
Henry, Kingdom Come Deliverance II	1/7, about 25.8 cm	Bulkamancer	€51,99	Historical steel with a raised sword and shield. The most realistic reference case, because you can look up what real harness does under light.
Hulkenberg, Metaphor ReFantazio	1/7, about 22.5 cm	Bulkamancer	€48,99	A fully enclosed knight harness including helm, pauldrons and greaves. Almost the entire figure is metal, so the whole model is one exercise.
Leona, League of Legends	1/7, about 24.1 cm	Bulkamancer	€63,99	Engraved sun armour with a large round shield and a sword. The best gold and brass subject in the range, and the shield face is a big flat canvas.
Gimli and Legolas	1/10, about 24.8 cm	Nomnom Figures	€70,99	Chainmail and an axe alongside a figure with almost no metal at all, which makes it a good study in contrast between materials.
Skull Knight, Berserk	1/10, about 25.5 cm	Nomnom Figures	€96,99	Armour on both rider and mount, so the metal surface area is effectively doubled. Suits a cold, desaturated steel.
Arthas, World of Warcraft	1/7, about 26.8 cm	Nomnom Figures	€102,49	Elaborate plate and the largest single readable blade in the catalogue. A project piece rather than a first attempt.
Witch King of Angmar	1/6, about 31.4 cm	Bulkamancer	€119,99	Dark plate across a very large silhouette. The interesting problem here is keeping metal readable while keeping it dark.
Frodo Baggins	75mm	Nomnom Figures	€22,99	A small blade and a mail shirt on an inexpensive kit. Good if you want to practise at 75mm before committing to a large piece.

If you want the cheapest possible way to try the technique on a genuinely metal subject, the Alphonse Elric chibi is a complete suit of armour on a kit that costs less than a decent brush, and chibi proportions mean the armour panels are large relative to the figure. It is not a display centrepiece, but it is an honest practice piece.

The full range is in the complete catalogue, and every kit is sold under a commercial print licence bought from the digital sculptor.

Common Mistakes and How to Spot Them

Most NMM problems have the same handful of causes, and all of them are diagnosable from a photograph.

It looks like grey plastic. Your range is too narrow. This is the most common failure by a wide margin. Take a photograph, convert it to greyscale, and compare the lightest and darkest pixels on the blade. If they are both somewhere in the middle, that is your answer.

It looks soft and pillowy. You blended too much. Reflections have hard edges. Put a hard boundary back in, particularly the horizon line.

It looks busy and confusing. Your light direction is inconsistent between parts, or you placed too many spot highlights. There should be one obvious brightest point per metal element, not several competing ones.

The gold looks like mustard. Your highlight is still yellow. Take it up to a near-white cream at the very top.

The metal looks flat next to the rest of the figure. The rest of the figure may be the problem. If the cloth and skin are also painted with a wide value range, the metal has nothing to contrast against. Metal reads as metal partly because it is more extreme than everything around it.

Everything looks fine up close and dead on the shelf. Your transitions are too fine for the viewing distance. Display pieces are usually looked at from about half a metre or more, and detail that only resolves at ten centimetres is invisible there. Step back and check while you work.

NMM or Metallic Paint?

NMM is not automatically the better choice, and treating it as the advanced option that everyone should graduate to leads people to use it where metallic paint would have looked better.

Choose NMM when the piece will live in a fixed spot under known lighting, when it will be photographed, when you want the metal to look painted and stylised rather than literal, and when you want full control over exactly where the eye goes. It photographs extremely well, which is a large part of why it dominates competition work.

Choose metallic paint when the piece will be handled or moved, when you want a fast result, when the metal areas are small and fiddly, and when you want genuine sparkle rather than a rendered impression of it. Modern metallic ranges are far better than their reputation and a well-shaded metallic finish beats a poorly executed NMM every time.

The two also mix. Using NMM on the large armour plates and metallic paint on small chains and buckles is a perfectly legitimate approach, and on a large kit it saves a lot of time without anyone noticing.

If you are still deciding how to approach a figure generally, the painting ideas guide covers technique choice more broadly, and the step by step painting guide covers the full sequence from primer to varnish.

Setting Up to Paint It

NMM depends on judging values accurately, which means it depends on your lighting more than most techniques do.

Paint under a single strong light rather than several, because several lights flatten everything and remove the very cue you are trying to reproduce. Use a consistent colour temperature, since a warm bulb will push you towards mixing colder than you intend. And ideally paint under something close to the light the figure will be displayed under.

A wet palette earns its keep here. Mixing a ladder of seven values takes time, and you will want those exact mixes available again tomorrow. Lay them out in order and keep them in order.

Mount the kit on a handle before you start. Painting a 25 cm resin figure held in your hand puts finger oils exactly where you are about to glaze. The painting setup guide and the tools guide cover the rest of the bench.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does NMM stand for?
Non-metallic metal. It means painting metal surfaces using only matte, non-reflective paint, so the metallic appearance comes entirely from the arrangement of light and dark.

Is NMM harder than using metallic paint?
It takes longer and it requires planning, but the hard part is judgement rather than brush control. If you can mix a consistent ladder of values and stick to one light direction, you can do NMM. Small figures are much harder than large ones.

What colours do I need?
Fewer than you think. A black, a white and one or two tinting colours will produce a full steel ladder. For gold, add a warm brown and a yellow. Buying a dedicated NMM set is not necessary, and the mixing is a large part of the learning.

Do I need an airbrush?
No. An airbrush is useful for priming and for laying a zenithal base quickly, but the technique itself is brush work. Everything described above can be done with two or three brushes.

Can I do NMM over the Gold finish level?
Yes. Gold kits arrive primed in a colour you choose, so you can start blocking in values immediately. Choosing a mid grey primer gives you the most neutral starting point.

Do the kits arrive painted?
No. Every kit ships unpainted at every finish level. What changes between levels is how much surface preparation has already been done.

Do I need to remove mould lines first?
There are none. A 3D printed part never touches a mould, so there is no flash, no casting seam and no vent. What you may find are support marks, and on Silver and Gold kits those are already sanded.

What size kit should I start with?
Something at 1/10 or larger, where the armour panels are wide enough to hold seven or eight values comfortably. Learning NMM on a small figure is learning two difficult things at once.

Will it still look metallic in a photograph?
Better than metallic paint will, usually. Metallic pigment often photographs as an undifferentiated bright smear, whereas NMM is already a rendered image and the camera simply records it.

How do I varnish it without ruining the effect?
Use a matte varnish. A gloss or satin coat adds a real specular sheen that competes with the painted one and confuses the eye. The whole point is that all the shine is painted.

Where to Start

If you have never tried NMM, do not start on the centrepiece. Take an inexpensive kit with a decent-sized blade or a plate chestpiece, mix a ladder of seven values before you touch the model, pick a light direction and write it down, and paint one element from start to finish.

Push the range further than feels right. Leave the hard edges alone. Look at it from across the room before you decide it is finished.

When you want the surface preparation handled for you so you can spend the evening on values rather than sanding, the Silver finish level is the one most people settle on. When you want to skip straight to paint, Gold arrives primed.

The kits listed above are a reasonable place to begin, and the complete catalogue has the rest.