Scythe Aesthetics

So this guy happened to my old scanner, which is now dead and gone.  The new one should be arriving any day now.

Death, as "the Reaper", gets a lot of variation in treatment in artwork.  The angle I find most compelling I would describe as realistic, solemn, and with careful elements of high fantasy added here and there.  Realistic and solemn I choose because Death is kind of a Big Deal.  He's the end of the road, the gatekeeper to the next world, the law no one escapes.  He should have an air of gravitas, solemn and grave (pun not intended, I swear), because of his position and responsibility.

Elements of high fantasy I choose because that's me, I enjoy coming up with fantastical things.  I specify "elements" because one of my pet peeves is a cartoony Death with a cartoony, overly ornamented scythe.  It's not the ornamentation I take issue with, though, it is the degree to which is it applied.  I would depict Death's scythe with a degree of decoration similar to a sword, or a wine goblet: it's polished enough or has just enough gems to show you're a person of importance, a knight, a noble, whomever, yet that polish or those gems won't get in the way of the sword or the goblet fulfilling its intended function.

Death I imagine as someone who wears the uniform (or robe) and tools and accessories of his position, and leaves it at that.  He wears them.  They are just ostentatious enough to show he is Death, the Reaper, and that is all.  He doesn't flaunt them or show them off, he goes about his duty and that is that.

A last note...if you take Death's scythe literally, as a farmer's scythe, it would be curved out to one side to fit around the farmer's body, an element which I incorporated it into the picture here.