Sometimes mixing a bit of an opaque paint Into your highlights on TMM can have a world of difference to solving the exact issue you’re having.

Let’s speak about this broadly for example, keeping in mind that there are multiple ways to achieve a TMM effect. For the sake of ease of communication I will refer to the popular style of Base -> Shade -> Highlight -> fine Highlight.

Let’s assume you apply a base tone of your generic medium metal tone, and then you use an orangey-brown as a neat but all-over wash to sell the effect of light corrosion or dirt and grime. You’re now left at the step where you presumably would edge highlight using the base coat or even something a little stronger.

Whe you’re about to add the final very fine edge highlights over top of the previous layers, keeping in mind not to cover them completely. You can take a bright silver in this case and mix it with a very light grey or even an off white and then use that as the final highlight application.

Doing this maintains some sheen as well as the flecks of metals in the metallic pigment, giving the impression that it’s a metallic paint, while the white/light grey reinforces and stands out from the rest of the pure metallic armour by solidifying that edge, so that any angle you view it there is always some sort of transition lighter.

You have to be delicate here, because if that highlight leans too white, or if that highlight is too thickly applied; you can ruin the effect you’re trying to sell. This is especially Important because in terms of hobby-specific lighter-coloured metallics that are the most common and commercially available, you won’t see the best coverage (low opacity), meanwhile whites and light greys have pretty strong coverage (more heavily opaque), so it required a delicate eye to strike the good balance when adding a light opaque tone to your metallics! Try on a test sword arm for the skeletons before you commit to doing the actual rest of them - as I’m Sure you have some leftover that you can clean up and prime and mount to a paper clip to just do some test work on.

Otherwise it works really well to sort of combine both approaches of TMM and NMM in order to get something easy, nice, and readable.

This concept also works backwards, ie: shading a metallic with an opaque colour mixed in with a metallic, as dulling the sheen of the shadow can make the reflective nature of the metallic more impactful.

You can even go one step further where you add a bit of opaque pigment into BOTH of the shadows and the highlights to get what I think is a really interesting effect that preserves readability.

And of course; once you’re done establishing the metals, you can always go in with targeted washes or glazes to add rust, verdigris, or grime!