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Anybody have any tips, or know of any good tutorials for painting gems? I have a lot of figures with little gems on them and I'm just not sure how to get the gems to really stand out. The small surface area of the gems in particular makes it difficult for me. (Being a noob doesn't help, but figured a good tut might at least get me trying the right way!) As always, thanks in advance for any assistance!

This is Otherworld's frost giant, a companion piece to the somewhat larger Reaper's Frorigh: Frost Giant. I painted a whole batch of frost giants, WIP here. As with Frorigh, I was trying for a raking, low arctic light effect. The lights are pale yellow, the shadows deep blue and violet. The figure has some fun details. He had a number of ovoid knobs on his tunic which I decided to paint up like red gemstones, garnets or rubies. The shadows are all painted on. I used metallic paints on the metals but also added lights, reflections, and colors.

On occasion I dig through Reaper's online back catalogue to find interesting old sculpts. Reaper has the virtue that it will cast any figure (outside of certain limited editions and a few other cases) for you if it still owns the rights and the molds to it. This means that even those old obscure figures are still available for purchase. There is already a thread for unique figures, those brilliant works of genius and madness. I figured this could be a thread for nice regular ones that might for various reasons be overlooked. For example, this very nice Dennis Mize female elf bard. She's not a bad mini, at all. She's a nice, attractive, decent-looking bard, maybe a little old-school, but appealing. But oh, my gosh, that unpainted photo of her is horrible. It's like the worst driver's license picture ever. It does her no justice at all. If you have a look at the painted versions of her, I think you'll agree she's a good mini at a good price.