There are many ways making a nice presentation , if you can texture, then you can do this. Just experiment a bit, its worth it. Gradients are just a very easy way to not just have a flat color, they work well , but you can do better. The first one is a example for something decent, well its pretty obvious but you could…
Hey man nice work, A few comments mostly on textures; I think the important thing is to make the damage believable, for example you have a saftey near the grip, when that rotates it might scrape the paint. Maybe some colour, or maybe some personal decorations look at the ingame one it has a shark smile on it ^^