
Originally Posted by
the dude who made the sword picture
Over the last two years or so I have been collection any image I could find of LaTene blades. I compiled a folder of xerox copies. I remember that page after page had come from Navarro. It is quite possible that all of the Late LaTene came from another source. Yet, I seem to remember that there was some Late LaTene in Navarro. (If Nate B. is listening he could answer this... he has a copy I believe).
I scanned each of these pages into photoshop, cropped each image and adjusted it to as clear an image as possible. I compiled all of these images onto a very large canvas and then began arranging them based on the general blade profiles given in Navarro and Pleiner for Early Middle and Late LaTene. In dealing with the Late LaTene there was so such variation that I came up with the arbitrary distinction of wide and narrow. (You are right in that it is not the best distinction.)
As I segregated these images, in most cases, the Early and Middle LaTene swords were proportional and I could just move them into position on the canvas. However with the late LaTene it was different. Because of the longer lengths, the plates were of different scales and also the fact that they were taken from several sources (you can see the different tonal differences in the cropping)... because of these factors, they had to be adjusted. All of the adjustments were proportional, so the relative dimensions are good. However the proportion between each blade is, as you have demonstrated, only ball park at best. I took two markers to try and shrink the swords to relative size: the length of the tang and the blade width... I tried to balance these two out as best as I could. (For instance, It might be that if I made the tang the same length the blade was obviously too wide compared to the other swords. So I made the sword smaller to match the width with other swords.)
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