Hey everyone. This is my latest piece. It's from a sword study I did for a male character of my fantasy novels. I often make character designs, customes, weapons, and such in my sketchbook. I wanted to paint some of my weapon studies, and I finally made some time to do it.

Tam's sword was very unique in design and shape, so I always held a soft spot for it. I scanned it into the computer, set it up on Photoshop, and started painting it (background, blade, and then handle).

The shape of the blade was originally inspired from a Dungeons and Dragons idea of a Githyaki silver sword (yes, I play D&D, and I love it. Boo-yah.). After I had the sword shape for the blade, I just kept adding and refining the blade design until it suited me (like when you polish something until it glows).

I was trying to balance the weight of the different widths of the blade so that it didn't look too symmetrical or unbalanced. I kept it to a study project instead of my favorite method of high rendering, so the metals and details are not super rendered. But I'll be do more like that later on.

If you have recommendations on ways to render metallics and metal lighting techniques and/or brushes, I would love to hear about it. Please send comments, recommendations, and critiques. I would love to have responses to this project. Thank you.