Work flow for finished sword design stage by stage...


When designing this sword I played around with a couple of different styles of finish, considering this I thought it would be good to share the method I chose to use for the finished design. Below you can see stage by stage how the sword progressed from line drawing to fully rendered illustration.

To start with I chose the colour palette by referencing this photo...




 Here's the line drawing and colour palette, the colours to the left are the shades, the ones in the middle are the base colours and the highlights to the right. The top row are for the grip of the handle, next three for the blade. The three underneath were used for a previous attempt but not in this one and the bottom three for the metal part of the handle. I kept it to three shades of each colour for simplicity...



I then changed the setting of this layer to multiply and worked in layers below this, the first layer being just for the base colours. 


Then I added the darker shades on a layer above, having decided the light source was coming from the top left of the picture. On the blade I looked at how the light bounced off the metal in the reference photo...


Next step was to add the highlights, on the blade I accidentally used some charcoal on the wrong layer which is why there's a change in texture in this shot...



I then added a new layer and used the willow charcoal brush to add some texture and blend some of the shades.



Next up I removed the line drawing and sharpened up the edges and filled any bits I'd missed.



I quite liked this finish but decided I wanted to use a thin outline so selected the Doodle pencil and changed the colour to black, then carefully drew a new outline to create the finished piece below.



I intend to use this work flow to complete my next designs for my primary project, such as the Merlin and Robo Samurai characters.

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