Lumen (Sword)

A long flared sword with a massive blue sapphire pommel, two large blue saphires on each end of aa golden guard inlaid with grape vines, The blade has sanksrit inscribed on it. — Lumen, complete, resting in grass at sunset

Back in 2019 author Ellen Sutherland asked if she could commission me to make a reproduction of the supernatural sword from her Jamie Poole series of YA books. Using her text descriptions and some rough sketches as well as some background information such as her inspirations and the lore of the sword itself, I set out to design what a tangible version of it, at least in one of its forms, would look like.

It was described as a sword of ancient Mesopotamian origin (so, Bronze Age) but made of a unknown silver-like metal (therefore I figured wouldn't be as 'fat' as a bronze sword, the latter usually being to make up for the softer bronze used). It would have a quite oversized pommel consisting of a singular massive orb-like sapphire and some kind of star-like light source trapped inside.

The blade would be inscribed with Sanskrit as laid out in the book (she provided me with the exact patterns). And the guard would be flanked by two other sapphire orbs and smaller jewels alongside embossed details of grape leaves/vines.

She intended to use the sword to travel with her to conventions and book readings/signings.

Something interesting happened in 2020 making that more difficult.

However, a bit later, as I was really enamoured with the idea of making a formerly-limited-to-literature sword come to life, we agreed to resume the commission and I set to work.

The first thing I did was create a template in Inkscape. This was both to establish the rough appearance of the sword as well as establish scale. A hand was used here scaled up to average human hand scale.

A lineart version of the sword with a small hand for scale — The template as originally presented.

I did some fun homework on Mesopotamian swords and kept the bronze age flare of the blade because that was also part of the book description, especially given where it was canonically smithed. But narrowed the blade a bit with the idea that a bronze age swordsmith would have wanted to preserve that precious magical metal especially if it was hard enough not to require such compensatory bulging.

Overall, the template wound up looking really close to the final prop. I didn't quite know how I'd do the embossed vines yet so I just kinda stuck on the vines for now. There wasn't a very detailed description of them in text so I did have some flexibility.

As this wouldn't be a typical cosplay prop, I gave it some heft to make it feel like a proper sword. I used a steel rod at the centre for strength but also weight(normally I would have used aluminum). The blade was modelled in Blender and printed in two long pieces on a CR-30 belt printer before doing lots of smoothing on it. I actually used a chisel to manually chisel in the Sanskrit due to the low fidelity I'd get printing it.

A sword blade in a 3D viewport with the wireframe showing. — The blade modelled in Blender

The large pommel sapphire was hard to source. Not the least was the fact that supply lines in 2020-2021 weren't exactly in great shape. So I actually modelled a hollow sphere and printed it in transparent resin dyed blue with blue Sharpie ink.

I'm holding a large blue cloudy sphere — The very large pommel. This is one of the few items spelled out in actual dimensions on the book so I had to make sure it was sized correctly. Yes, it really is that big :)

Inside I used some funky lenticular diffusion plastic I've had in a junk box for years now and two very bright green LEDs (because yellow through blue sapphire would by necessity come out a bit green anyways) to produce a funky and illusionary lighting effect. With the power being a small CR2032 cell hidden in the pommel.

The guard was printed in multiple parts on my tiny Anycubic Mono resin printer. They were modelled in Blender again and I used a public domain 3D scan of a grape vine as inlay. The effect, though needing a LOT of geometric cleanup, worked better than I'd hoped. The handle was FDM printed in PLA for strength.

Vines inlaid onto a 3D modelled guard — The 3D scanned vine detailed worked better than expected

With the pommel and PLA handle inserted.

The two guard edge sapphires were also resin printed. The smaller ones were actually just dollar store craft gems that fit perfectly. Finally I weathered it some (not too much as canonically the blade has no dings nor can it really get that dirty). And leather wrapped the handle with actual leather strap.

In the end both I and Ellen were very happy with the result. I was able to present it to her wrapped up and as a lovely surprise as, absent the template and a few little in progress shots here and there, the final result was kept as a surprise.

She's still bringing it to her con tables to this day and even posed with it in multiple publicity shots.