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.