I made a model of Gimli, Son of Gloin's Battle Axe, from the Lord of the Rings.
I started with a plain and then subdivided it many times until I had a grid that I could shape into the main body of the axe.
I extruded the new shape I had made until it matched proportions I had roughly measured.
I then added the cuffs I guess you could call them, and added a layer to the handle to add thickness.
Then I extruded the body a bit farther to make the ornamental cap at the end.
By utilizing loop cut and slides I created a hand full of rings and used them to add bevels and realistic ornamentation as per the images I was using as reference.
I extruded from the main haft out to where I thought the blades should go unto. I used a background image to help me plot points to get the more difficult angles and curves.
By using a mirror I only had to trace out one side and then I could simply reflect out into mesh the other side.
I combined the two into one object and tried to seem them together well.
I beveled the edges and raised the blade edges to give a more physically accurate representation of the reference picture.
Next I plotted a UV map on to one of the reference images I was using and did my best to place it proportionally.
For me the most difficult part of using Blender was maintaining all of the edges and plains I created, because a lot of the time they would hide in/on each other and make shaping difficult and frustrating. I spent a lot of time going back and re-tracing my object into a shell from a nest of edges. In the end I decided to move on because it was so time consuming.
Another thing that I found difficult and frustrating was trying to understand and use materials and textures. The mapping of the UV mesh was very clunky and troublesome, and it was difficult to keep the image mapped proportionally to the object. I’m sure if I had the time to break the image down to its plainer parts and had made the object mesh with fewer plains the mapping would have been much simpler a process.
With that being said I was quite surprised with the death of Blender and would love to give it another go, albeit over a larger period of time.