Okay. This is for the challenge at Game-Art.net to make a Medeival weapon at under 250 polys, with 512x textures. So basically make the Normal map, give the Diffuse maybe a muted Khaki, and the spec map a nice orangey yellow... I'll probably also bung on a fake reflmap in the diffuse, but somewhat muted, and see how it…
The reflection seems to help a bunch. I made this with an orange tinted reflection map and a bright specular, didn't touch the diffuse. used this pic from Dejawolf's link as ref http://theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/Samples/079.4/index.s12.html
Gold tends to reflect a lot, so if you're just painting a diffuse map (no specular), you should probably make the base colour quite dark, desaturated brown/yellow (as CheeseOnToast shows above), then paint a fairly wide highlight with a quite saturated yellow/orange midtone, then pick out some sharper spots with white. I…