Non metallic metal, or NMM, is a daunting endeavor. Almost every video you see will look painstakingly difficult and time consuming. The outcome looks fantastic and best of all you don't have to work with metallic paint. I hate working with metal paints because the clump, they are hard to get even and in bright light they they are so reflective it's hard to see how you are painting. They also get into your water and infect your other paints of you don't change your water.
My Dogs of War / Kingdoms of Men / Empire of Sonnishtal are largely heavily armored humans and I want to paint a whole army with NMM, so with that in mind I needed a faster technique. I stumbled across the loaded brush technique and here I am.
Completed first attempt
You can find heaps of detail on how to perform the loaded brush technique of wet blending on Painting Buddha, a wonderful site that you should really support if you find them helpful. They make amazing videos.
So the trick with this technique is practice practice practice. Learning how wet to make the brush, how much highlight to put on the tip depending on the size of the material and how bright you want the highlight and the right thickness of each of the paints. When you do it right the results are amazing and right now I get it right 1 in 2 or 3 (or 4) attempts.
So to practice I'm painting a unit of Knights. The pictures on Here are the WIP, and almost the whole model is done with the loaded brush. They are far from my best work, but it is quick, maybe half an hour for the metal on each horse, and I'm getting faster. Please (pretty please?) ignore the shoddy work on the extra bits like gloves and faces, like I said these are practice models for the NMM look and otherwise paited up to "battlefield" quality.
Final horse, obviously not complete but the armour is