To get back into the swing of things using Maya I chose to create something simple that could also include detail, I went with a fire axe as my chosen model. This had taken me roughly 4 hours to make including all the textures and adding the normal maps. One thing that I had struggled with on this model was finding how to add bump/normal maps into Arnold renders. I had found that the reason the maps originally did not show up was because I did not have them installed into an Arnold shader and instead i was using the standard Maya blinn. This problem was a quick fix once I knew what I was doing. I used a few different reference images for the colour scheme of the axe and also the proportions. Overall I think I had done a good job with the textures and the model itself. The UV unwrapping process was also pretty straight forward.
This was my attempt at displaying the axe I created professionally. 
joshforrestnextgen 