Believe it or not, the sword was drawn with GA 5. It consists of four objects - the blade, the hand guard and pommel, the grip, and the groove in the blade. It was then taken to an external image editor.

Paint Shop Pro's Sculpture effect was used to give the metal parts their shiny, 3D look. A texture fill and bevel fleshed out the grip.

The animated lighting effect was done with Ulead's GIF-X 2 Plugin. The effect I used is "Scan."