The rendering, as long as you're shooting for a rougher approach, looks quite alright to me. I find the metal texture of the swords blade doesn't come across quite as much as on the hilt yet (there are tons of color variants in there, since metal reflects pretty much everything around it; see here).
This might be just me, but recently I started always giving sketches a background, no matter how vague. I assume that you're only shooting for the character anyway, but giving something as simple as a background color (with a border maybe), makes your image pop a bit more, in my opinion, because the highest values of white are only on the character and not on the background anymore, which gives your content more contrast.
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I find the metal texture of the swords blade doesn't come across quite as much as on the hilt yet (there are tons of color variants in there, since metal reflects pretty much everything around it; see here).
This might be just me, but recently I started always giving sketches a background, no matter how vague. I assume that you're only shooting for the character anyway, but giving something as simple as a background color (with a border maybe), makes your image pop a bit more, in my opinion, because the highest values of white are only on the character and not on the background anymore, which gives your content more contrast.