Composition

Trying to work with some suggestions I received in class, not really happy with the snake skin texture. It was hard live tracing it and trying to distort it without a preview of it on the snake. I want to try the idea of a "dust bunny" to go with the vacuum snake. Need to work on value, vacuum head of snake, and placement of the head.

Vectors

Live Trace did not work well with the snake so I needed to do everything by hand. It's looking more snake-like than it did before, even with its flaws.

Here one can see the different elements I am vectoring which will eventually come together, I need to now begin on the composition of the scene.

My first attempt of a combination of the household appliance and the snake and making it come together a little more in the big picture.

This time I remembered to expand the grass image to actually make it into a vector so now I need to work on my layering

More of a desert type scene

First Class - Fantasy Appliance

An image trace of the original knife.

Here is my first attempt at creating a vector of a knife. My original plan is to vector knives to imitate a snake's fangs. I started to play around with the gradient and I need to tweak it to make it more realistic, but I have a basic understanding of what to do.

This vector isn't quite as chopped up and separated as I deleted the unnecessary points. I still need to 

separate areas in order to control the gradient.

My first tracing of the snake in Illustrator. If I continue using the idea of the knife, I may get a different image of a snake head that is much larger to emphasize the danger and sharpness of the knives. I could also take another approach with the intricate curves of the snake body. perhaps the hose of a vacuum cleaner? The snake head could then have a suction dynamic to "inhale" objects much like how it swallows animals whole.

A first play on the idea of the vacuum cleaner. 

Clearly the perspective of the vacuum must be fixed.