[wip] sword shading

[Phlox]

I drew this sword for practice but i couldn't get the highlights and shading right.  I need some help thanks.

[lilwing]

it looks really round becaus of the way you shaded it. blades are like other metallic objects. you could make it look more polygonal. define more of a point at the tips of your sword. this looks like a scimitar, so you could use something like below to model it with:

[Phlox]

I used you picture to shade and reshape the blade a bit.  I also decided to remodel the handle because this is pretty much just practice.

[lilwing]

big improvement. looks a lot better.

if you shade the back side and stuff a little more, the outline of the spine down the middle wouldn't be necessary

[Phlox]

How does it look now i shaded the back more and tried to fix the highlights on the handle

[lilwing]

really looks a lot nicer with the shading... maybe you will still need that spine.

you should antialias the front side of the blade now, to take away the sketchyness and to give it more of a rounded quality. i don't think you need to antialias the back because it blends in really well.

[Phlox]

Ok. Thanks for the tips it really helped. 

[fil_razorback]

I have two crits on this piece :
-Metal needs CONTRAST, that makes it look...like metal. Your colors are too close to one another.
-DIthering is a nono on metal, it makes your metal look like rubber.

[Phlox]

Is this better? I think the contrast looks much better.  Also I agree about the dithering, now that i changed it, it makes it look more shinny more like metal should.

[Phlox]

really looks a lot nicer with the shading... maybe you will still need that spine.

you should antialias the front side of the blade now, to take away the sketchyness and to give it more of a rounded quality. i don't think you need to antialias the back because it blends in really well.

I know what anti aliasing is but how do I do anti aliasing I've never done it before.  Could you give me an example of how to do it maybe. I use graphics gale free edition not photo shop and I don't know how to do it with gale.