Simplifying it Down

Here I had to consider what my character and props would look three dimensional, so I tried drawing these contour lines  for the mask and bowl cut hair.  the body is simplified to mostly triangles and rectangles, which would translate to cones and cylinders.

I also had to consider how many knives I wanted on the keyboard/piano. I considered 8 for the 8 c-major Do Re Me Fa So La Ti notes, but I decided I could simply copy and paste these 8 multiple times to get a full keyboard if need be. I also considered if the 'cut' of the table should be decorative or not to fit the showman motif.

I also toyed around with a skull candle to light the scene, but in the end scrapped it because the table is crowded enough with 20 knives.

I considered stabbing all the knives into the side of the table to look more like actual piano keys, and when flicked they'ed ping up and down and make sense to resonate, but this looked less threatening than the laid out knives so I experimented some more with representing my knife layout as a keyboard.

A pipe organ, a very dramatic instrument, can have two layers of keys to look more dramatic, I could have a 2 layered table like two tier cake tray, but the number of keys could complicate how convincing I can animate the song, and how large the prop will be relative to the character.

I also started experimenting with knife layout to represent the keyboard, with shorter knives darkened with bloodstains to be the small black keys and larger, cleaner knives being the white keys. While this wouldn't make sense musically (which would be largest to smallest to get the right organisation of 'sound') it helps make a visual connection to a keyboard.

At this point I also decided that since knives were a metallic instrument that bell music would be more suited to my piece than strings, pipe organs, or wine glasses. So I decided to use this music.