So, I challenged myself to take on a request from someone and ended up needing to learn how to draw gold. (He wanted something similar to my avatar.) I think it’s not too bad, but I’d like to hear what someone else thinks… 
I’m thinking of making it a gif, with sparkles and gemstones raining around it, and I’ll change the background to something more interesting…
I think you are up to a good start.
I recommend to look for reference material ‘golden lucky cat statue’ if you want to improve further about lighting, shape and colour.
Metal material is rather hard for me as well but lucky there are may pictures of golden cats on the internet^^
Thank you! 
I did use a reference (several as a matter of fact), but it will take more projects and further reading to get better. Glad to hear I’m not the only one who finds metal texture challenging. 
very nice golden cat 
Thank you! 
This is fun! I like the colors you picked.
As far as critiques I noticed that there are no contact shadows in certain areas, particularly underneath the collar and neckpiece. Additionally, the very dark color at the bottom, which is also used for the mouth, doesn’t appear again, resulting in a lack of contrast. The white outlines don’t give a shiny effect; instead, they make it look more transparent, almost like jello!
It’s essential to choose a direction for the light source to illuminate the metal. You can also integrate reflections from the environment, allowing colors to bounce around. For instance, introducing some purple into the shadows could enhance realism through a lighting layer.
Regarding your palette, using it with an ink mode on your brush can make shading easier. Use the ink shading option(in the ink bottle settings). Select your colors by clicking and dragging; when you draw with them, the shades in the image that match those in the selected colors will either darken or lighten to match the next shade up or down depending on how you adjust the settings in the dropdown next to the ink bottle icon. Make sure to return the ink mode to simple ink when you want more basic control.
It can be messy but it gets ideas down faster so maybe keep an extra layer from before this step.
I notice you have some redundant colors in your image (the ones that look similar when you squint)
If you flip your image (either shift + H or Edit > flip horizontal) then you get a better idea of what might be wrong
After some more tweaking like adding whiskers, highlights for the eyebrows, adding more brown colors, shadows in the ears, using some of those blueish greens in the neck piece, darkening the eyes a bit for the inset gem look, and a lot more shading (including using a layer mode to darken eyes[if you want a super strict palate then avoid]) I got here:
In the end, if you compare a desaturated version of both images you can get a better idea of what would be good to change in terms of values(brightness).
It’s quick and messy so if you don’t like any aspect of the changes I hope they are at least a useful comparison to you.
You’re always so indepth with your feedback, I really appreciate the time you put in your answers.
I very much like what you did around the eyes… suddenly there’s more depth and the feline features are more strongly expressed. I’ll have to save the image for future reference.
I’ve read on other forums that gold tends to have a greenish hue for shadows, but that was some time after I’d drawn this.
Going with more brownish colors and making the statuette darker is a definite improvement, I’m going to have to practice that…
Thank you for sharing your knowledge, it’s still going to be a long way, but knowing what to work on will make the process of learning easier.
Have a good one!
