Very interesting result indeed! You are off to a great start and hopefully my opinion may help you go a bit further in your NMM quest. I am no NMM expert, but I found NMM is about 2 things: Light placement and color blend.
I have to respectfully disagree with Monkeysplitters. You don\'t need to get it absolutely perfect, but perfect for you. That is, better than you thought you could do. It\'s by being totally anal on a model and going back to fix things now that you ensure you learn how to fix it, not by moving on. Perfection isn\'t about getting a 10 on CMON, for one thing CMON is a popularity vote on a picture of a model, and no one could ever get a 10 because of a lot of griefers who enjoy voting 1\'s to bring scores down. Just remember because a model scored 9.8 on CMON does not make it necessarily better than a 9.5.
To improve this, I\'d first look at smoothening your color blends. It\'s pretty good but the smoother the better. Diluting your paint more would help, and applying a glaze of a neutral gray , 1 part paint 10 parts water could help blur the lines we see up close.
For light placement, it\'s a bit inconsistant. Take the lower right gold portion with chaos star. You go from dark to bright to dark over 4 times on that panel. Usually on SENMM, on a given flat surface, you should only see 1 such transition, 1 horizon. Have a look here:
http://www.coolminiornot.com/89285
Notice on the front panels how light goes from dark to bright towards the bottom? And no actual horizon lines are shown. That\'s because the panel is pointing upwards, and wouldn\'t get to reflect he horizon line. If you are mindful of what angle your panels are at, applying horizon lines becomes easier. If a panel is perfectly perpendicular to the ground, than a horizon line should be right in the middle of it. On a panel like the front of a dread, aiming slightowards upwards, your horizon line should be placed more towards the bottom part of the panel, because this panel is reflecting more sky than earth, it\'S aiming upwards. When the panel is pointing too much at the sky, you shouldn\'T get a horizon line at all, as only sky is reflected. You simply reflect the sky, with dark at teh top and bright at the bottom, just like it is before you make that dark horison line.
To emphasize the shine, we tend to place horizon lines even when there should not be, but keep it at one! I find it simpler to lay out all my horizon lines on surfaces and then blend from there.
For your hoses, I would paint them SENMM like the steel you\'Ve done. That means in the middle of the coil, a dark horizon line, then shade towards bright below, and dark above the line. When I painted the cables on my Dreadnought, I used my brush sideways, stroking along the length of the cable, to only apply a thin line running across the length of the of it. I start with a dark line and then a bright one to make my horizon line, then apply paler and darker lines above and below to create the blend. Mine was about 8 different colored lines, blurred a bit with a glaze. Go back with your darkest grey (not black!) and painstakingly line every coil of the cable for the final result. Don\'t be mistaken though, I have to fix and adjust and start over many times to get them to look good, it\'s a lot of work those cables.
I haven\'T touched NMM in years so I\'m rusty on the subject, but hopefully this will give you a hand for now. Don\'t give up, you\'Re doing great, it\'s a matter of hard work to improve the blends and spending the time to fix it all. That dread I did took me 300 some hours, imagine how yours will look if you spend that much time!
Vincent Hudon
Silphid
