Zidane Tribal: Dagger

When I was a kid, I used to go all teary when I got bored. One Summer holiday my parents had this idea to give me a load of balsa wood, my mum taught me how to make these pretty little boxes by using Balsa cement, pins, pictures from magazines, and PVA glue. Since then, I have loved working with the stuff and jump at every opportunity that comes along. This was one of them.
More recently it's just been steampunk stuff I've made. I was really rather proud of the plaster holder I made, and the weenie pill box with rotating lid, too. But honestly, when the idea popped into my head to make a DAGGER out of balsa, I was a little stumped as to HOW I'd do it to begin with.
Well, first thing to do, was decide WHICH Dagger I'd make. I plan to make a Thief Sword at some point for this guy, but for now, just a dagger. Settling on the Mythril dagger was a choice helped by my friend Katie, and my mum.
Initially I thought about just building it from memory, then realised that was probably a bad idea, and located some pictures and did some rough measurement in Photoshop. I had my laptop with me the whole time I was building this(It was also supplying the music, so made sense).
I drew the basic shapes as patterns on paper, then transfered these to the wood. The basic dagger shape was probably the easiest part to make to be honest. The 'blade' was easy to shape, just carve away at it with a scalpel blade at an angle, and then sand it down till it's nice and smooth.
The Hand guard proved a problem once I realised it wasn't totally flat on both sides! Problem solved by adding some extra balsa on the blade side and carving that down to a nice shallow angle. Then realised that it wouldn't sit properly on the blade... Carve out the shape of the blade. Right, DONE! The extra side detail on the Hand guard was all my idea. Well, one side anyway. I only had some very vague pictures to work from, so had to wing it on most parts. One side has a heart and vines sort of design, the other, a rather clever little 'ZT' interwoven design. Playing with the idea this dagger was one Zidane may have had for a long time and had 'personalised' or something.
Anyway, onward! To The Hand Grip! This was another challenge, lack of images made it a bit difficult really. Solution? Find a picture of a Mythril SWORD, and work from that. This was where I discovered a new technique of patterning/carving/shaping balsa. Being a soft wood, I always knew that I could press things into it to shape it, but I'd never through of pressing into it and sanding at the same time! That's how I got the cross design on the hand guard to be raised. To create the 'ridges' I used a round craft tool I got in a cheapy set of craft blades ages and ages ago.
The Pommel. Not so hard really, layering and shaping of balsa to fit and look good. I'm proud of how it came out really.
Blade detail. It wasn't so easy to do this part. I didn't want to draw straight onto the blade I'd made so found some thin-ish balsa, and worked on that. Now, I assumed this design went up and over the top of the blade as well as on either side. I worked with this, refusing to give up. I traced the design onto the wood, cut out the basic shape, then set about making the detail pattern. Deciding I didn't want both sides identical, I managed to split off one of the 'vines' into two over the top, so there's an extra vine woven into the design on the other side! Another task of pressing and sanding to make the design stand out. Done.
The blade ridge detail was done by eye, so the two sides aren't identical. but it might have been a bit hard to make a pattern for that one anyway.
Right now this dagger is STILL unpainted. I'm awaiting the arrival of my air brush, and then I can go out and buy a can of propellant and start base coating this baby! =D
The picture is the 'ZT' detail.