Judging from the length of the blade, I would class this as a short sword (it has about a two foot blade, if you go by how many 'hands' long it is.)

This started life as me blocking out the shapes for a sword I was going to paint. I took a new approach of blocking in the whole object, then starting to erase areas of it to get an idea of the volume and shading - and it so turns out that doing this produces awesome, clean shapes.

I purposely didn't clean up the outlines too much on this, because I didn't want it to look like vector. (Instead, you can look at the shakiness of the lines and judge for yourself what my caffiene consumption today has been.)

Next : I _am_ actually going to render this with proper colours and metal surfaces and shiz.

Thanks due to Jess, who's lent me her Wacom Graphire4 for the week (because mine is STILL in Mt Isa.)