Looking really cool! I definitely think you're picking up on a lot of things pretty quickly, especially for someone just starting out with handpainting. I know you're going on to a new sword, and I think that's probably the right call, you can keep iterating on your process from start to finish and what not. That said I…
Looking better and better you are doing great! Above I made some little changes. I believe the main thing would be try and give form to each big geometry you have. For example if you make the handle darker as it turns in space ( where the cylinder form starts to face away from us ) then the viewer will understand that its…