Re: Dragon Age Enchanted Dagger Build, Help I'm stuck!
Okay, cool that info helps quite a bit. In this case, if you still prefer to stay away from wood (though I would point you there for the sake of cost and look), layered plastic would probably be a good bet, as mentions by Chef.
I have worked with the pink foam and it is often murder on tools (heat wires and such). It is also less than fun to paint and not pleasant for disposal or sculpting purposes (true of many hard Styrofoam like materials).
Thus, I would head to a local hobby store and see if they sell thick styrene or another thick plastic sheet and plan to layer them together.
However, if you have some sculpting talent, there is another good way to go about it. Use apoxy scupt or plumber's putty on top of a thin plastic design. Folkenstal's stuff used this approach and it turned out great. You simply cut out your basic pattern outline on a thin piece of styrene and then build up the "3d" aspects to create the blade and hilt. I used this approach to create my own version of a crysknife and it worked great (except that I am very bad at sculpting). It takes patience and a fine hand. Check out Folkenstal's build threads hear at the RPF or look into his website, lots of good stuff. You can get great results with this method if you have some sculpting experience. Just search his name. He also used video game references for many of his projects, which means it is quite good for your purposes.
Would love to see build progress when you get it going. If you send me a pm with some in game pics, I can try to get a you a vector graphic of the thing (no promises, as the holidays might zap my time). Still it looks like you did yours by hand (better than my drawing skills I assure you, well done). The vector graphic, however, would let you play with the scale digitally in free vector software like inkscape. It would also let you create separate versions for different materials (a wood material design, for example, would probably benefit with a blade separate and require the blade to have a full tang to add some support in the grip).
