Anne Foerster writes the manual and shows the user the steps to go through. This set includes two brushes, a 5/0 and a 1, nine paints as follows; Dragon Black, Olive, Desert Gold, Aged Red Brick, Oiled Leather, Slate, Granite, Dragon White and Warm Walnut. Two figures are included, 2558, Anduriel Brightflame, Elven Warrior, and 2608, Tyden, Female Barbarian.

In looking the figures over, Tyden is holding a sword in her right hand and a small buckler on her left. The right hand is raised overhead and the sword upside down, as if she had just delivered a slashing blow. The buckler touches her at the waiste. The hair is long and flowing, moving pat the shoulders. The figure has minimum details in that it has only a chainmail bikini on in addition to a few other trinkets like bracers, chainmail skirt and boots. The figure, like most females, is very smooth and doesn’t have a lot of folding details. No cloaks or heavy plates. She has flak on the base, both sides and bottoms, on the bottom of her hair, and left elbow and her sword. She has excess flash on the inside of her left arm making it difficult to get to. Outside of that, the figure has no flaws and is very crisp in detail.

Anduriel is the opposite. While his hair is at his shoulder and his armor covers much of him, he has designs in the armor, a tunic that flows past his wait in-between his legs. His right arm holds a sword while his left hand holds a dagger folded back against the wrist. He has no noticeable mold lines nor flak.

The paints come in twist bottles and weigh in at ¾ ounces each. Unlike the previous set, this one has a lot of crossover with the previous one including Oiled Leather, Dragon White, Dragon Black, and to a lesser extend, Warm Walnut, which seems to be a custom made paint for this set, but is similar to a lighter Walnut. This reduces the overall value for those who have all three kits. In terms of use, I’ve been learning not to like the twist bottles. While I’ve never had a Pro-Paint require a set of pliers to open like I have had to do for older Games Workshop bottles, I find it easier to mix a dropper bottle, as the portion control is easier. In addition, while the caps don’t get as gummed up as the Games Workshop tended to, they still become gummed up and I usually wait a second for the paint to fall back into the bottle before taking paint out of the bottle, least I splatter myself with paint from the lid.

The instructions have good and bad traits to them. Unlike previous kits, the instructions here go beyond one page, to two pages. They also include more photos of the miniatures in work. The bad news is that it’s taken a tremendous leap somewhere in terms of complexity. “This is not a paint kit for the fait-of-heart; we are going to be mixing a lot of colors!” Now I’m of the opinion that a Learn To Paint Kit should be as simple as possible. Perhaps for Non-Metallic Metal, just two heavily armored knights who have little other details to them requiring just some granite, slate, Dragon White and Dragon Black for silver.

Instead, everything requires mixing. Because the paints are best when thinned, it even notes that on the base coasts as well as the formulas of water to paint ratio for washes and highlights. Want an example? Take Tyden’s skin. It’s Desert Gold 4, Aged Red Brick 1, White 1, and Water 3-4. That’s not an easy mix to get when using a twist off bottle. Some of the other’s are a little easier like Anduriel’s Hair, Desert Gold 4, Oiled Leather 1, Water 3.

The instructions walk you through each figure’s areas and includes up close shots of what area you should be working on. While that’s good, there’s still not enough room to show the transition in the instructions themselves. For example, they don’t show you Tyden’s skin going through a base and two highlights. The good news is that for the standard parts of the figure, the instructions go quick with a base, sometimes a wash, a highlight, and sometimes a second highlight. The bad news is that it doesn’t tell you how to apply those colors when dealing with the NMM material like the gold armbands or the silver swords, instead relying on you to read the second on the back covering the NMM technique. In addition, there is one mistake, referring the reader to use Linen White instead of Dragon White, and a lot of Tyden’s details like scabbards and pouches, are not covered.

The good news for the NMM technique is that there’s a full two pages of instructions on how to do it. These instructions are broken up into six areas. Step’s one through three are related as they show putting your basecoat then brightest highlight in step one, then darkest shadow, then reflections. The good news is that Anne provides the details on which colors to pick when doing silver. Of course, that means the bad news is that she doesn’t provide those colors when doing gold. The other sections covered angled surfaces, curved surfaces and intricate and small surfaces. The bad news is that there’s no real way to get into this small section the ideas of chrome or sky-ground techniques, instead relying on the photos and the text to give you the methods to handle a wide variety of material.

Unlike the sections where you lay down your base colors, this one does show you three stages for each figure, so you see the base coat with it’s brightest highlight followed by the darkest shadows and reflections. This allows you to visually follow each section from start to finish, unlike say one of the figure’s hair or skin tones.

After looking at my figures, I can tell that there’s a lot of practice involved in this and that it’s still not going to be something I do for each and every figure. Getting the darkest shadows and brightest shadows and then adding in the reflections on straight surfaces like a sword, is no easy thing. Getting all the details on small surfaces is not easy. The book even notes that it’s the “Fudge It” rule where you have to “just do whatever looks good.”

If you’re not comfortable with layering and washes, or if you’re not comfortable with mixing your paints, this guide is not for you. The extra pages in this book in addition to the advanced coverage of NMM, give this book a specific target audience and if you’re looking to start NMM technique, is a good introduction.

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