My metal is improving but my gemstones need a lot of work!

Indeed, the metal here is very nice! The thing at the bottom left looks like a wooden, polished sphere - cool effect if that is what you intended! The gemstones don't have quite the gem-stone feel otherwise as you yourself mention. The light reflecting in a gemstone is very complex and you are probably best off looking at a reference to properly reproduce a decent effect of such an item.
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Griatch

Yes, I need to use more reference really. The bottom left one was intended to be a gemstone originally, but as it looked more like wood, I went along with that instead. I owe my improvement in metal to Draconian.

Naaaaaw. I learnt all my stuffs from tuts on the web and the kind and talented folks here.

I did finish a couple of segments on metallic gradients and the 27 different ways to make chrome and other metals today. Just have to tweak a few things and they'll be posted in the next day or so. Your metal does look a lot mo bedder gooder!

Thanks Drac. We all learn from each other and that's the good thing about websites like this one.

Just be greatful that you can do it at least, cuz some people (like me) have no idea how to do that

None of us knew how before we learnt. There are some excellent tutorials here on Gimp Chat, but it was actually one small piece of advice that Draconian gave somebody about using render/clouds that improved my metal almost overnight.