This sounds like a newbie question, but what are some of the techniques to paint bare metal items - shovels, crow bars, starter handles, etc. without using metallic colors. Metallic doesn’t seem the way to go, and various greys are.
I always just use various hardnesses of leads in my drafting pencils; mostly gray obviously but I have a few that are more silvery than pencil black. Can give you a variety from recently chipped to dulled by a layer of soil and dust. Colored pencils in dark browns/oranges can depict wear and rust.
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But what do you use as a base color - matte greys?
I pretty do just German WWII so I paint them in the black/dark gray color they shipped out in and do the pencil work over that.
Darker grey base with lighter grey/ white highlights and dark washes.
Thanks. I’m already using most of these suggestions - matte greys, pencil lead, and colored pencils, washes, and pigments. I was just a bit dissatisfied with my results and wanted to see what better modelers use.
It takes a lot to make non-metallic paints look like metal.
Agreed.
There are some NMM (non-metallic metal) paint sets that people use. Andrea miniatures makes one (I love their acrylic paints) but it’s a little hard to get in NA.
Non-metallic metal (NMM) was all the rage in Warhammer 15, 20 years ago — largely because the Games Workshop painting studio (the ’Eavy Metal team) used it in Warhammer books and magazines. IIRC, the real reason for that was because NMM looks better in photos than metallic paint does, but it — of course — lead to all the GW fanboys trying to paint their models with the same technique.
The reason I mention this is that you can read up on how fantasy and SF wargamers paint metals, and adapt that to modelling of real-world subjects.
FWIW, these days I usually use a half-and-half method. I paint things like tank tracks with a medium grey, give it a darker grey wash to shade it and then highlight with metallic paint, usually a kind you can polish up to an actual shine. I sometimes use a 2B graphite pencil as well.
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One of the things driving NMM as a painting technique was because it allows the modeler to force the metallic elements to have the same illumination as the rest of the miniature, so the highlights on the metal parts are consistent with the highlights and shading on the rest of the miniature, which was considered essential to the best presentation of the miniature for competition; when you use metallic paints for the metal parts of a miniature, then your highlights on the metallic parts are driven by the illumination where the miniature is displayed, which could conflict with the highlights and shading on the rest of the miniature.
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I thought they only did that for a few miniatures?
I’ve tried that on sword blades on miniatures up to 54 mm. It’s a confusing combination of various grays, white, yellow, blue, and even green (depending on what you want being reflected in the surface). A LOT easier to get wrong than right!
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In the case of mini’s I agree, but I’m asking about grungy, and used tools on board military vehicles. Gloss steel, or gunmetal don’t look right!
I like to look at real items and figure out how I would replicate them. Having used shovels and shooters for burying comms cables I got interested in how tools really look on military vehicles. I did an old Sherman with dirty tools, roots and all, like in the photo.
Examples: two shooters - two different approaches.
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Hmmm…were either shovel painted or bare steel?
Both painted. I don’t recall seeing many military tools unpainted. Doesn’t mean someone can’t Google up some. It just goes with the military mindset - making stuff last. I remember us having to paint our e-tools in BasicTraining.
No metallics here:
Painted sledge hammer, pickaxe head, shovel and axe:
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Hmmm…drybrushing, stippeling, washes, etc. - sounds like a plan! 
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Uncle Night Shift does some good methods on his YouTube channel using various greys and rust washes
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This is an excellent example of metal with non-metallic colors. Done by those expert painters at MiniArt. Slava Ukrainie!
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This is truly amazing.