Quote:

If you don't want to buy photoshop you could use gimp.



Yea he could do but the thing is though, The Gimp is a lot like Photoshop and even for me, it's taken a bit of time to grasp. It's way more advanced than Ulead.

MS Paint >>> Basic
Ulead >>> Intermediate
Photoshop >>> Advanced

ok let me tell you exactly where you're going wrong . Wireframe looks good. Tri stripping looks fine . Can't see any problems. Your main problems are skinning. Don't forget to check out some tutorials on skinning too later but in the picture you showed me:

I can see both sides of the knife which you don't need. You need to overlap the mesh so that both sides look like 1 side. Sorry for my terrible explanation . This will allow for more detail because you can enlarge the mesh. Don't forget that the bigger the mesh is, the more detail you will see on the model. When you get better at skinning, you'll be doing some far more advanced unwrapping like this:



I had to unwrap each face and connect them together. It's quite tricky but once you get the hang of it, it'll be like 2nd nature .



I used a simple shade of grey for the blade and highlighed the edges. My client may decide to use shadows to make the model reflective .