I like how we really see your improvement ! :) However you really have issue with the number of poly. Hope this help, red lien are completely useless edgeloop that serve 0 purpose i don't even know why you put them. Some of them have really small almost invisible variation, it's useless in handpaint low poly. The orange…
these look great ! I love handpainted textures but I have to agree with alifarsangi on the UV space instead of rotating your blade by 45° in UV space you could also do what I do : I usually use 2:1 scaled texturemaps for swords, so something like 2048*1024