1 Pound of Flesh

This image was inspired by a line out of a movie that came from a Shakespeare play called The Merchant of Venice.  The line is "One pound of flesh, nothing more nothing less. No cartlidge, no bone, but only flesh."  To me this line has a rather dark undertone so i decided to make an image with that same feeling.

In the movie, the line was on a note written by a murderer who made is victim cut of a pound of his own flesh.  The had to choose between that or death.  That explains the bloody scalpel.  The design is not all that difficult to make; it took only two days.

• To start make a simple Gradient using gray and white.  Make sure it coincides with the the angle of the shadow that you will have to apply to the scalpel.
• Next find an image of a scalpel or surgical knife and cut it out so that there is nothing left from the picture besides the actual knife/ blade.
• Go to Layer> Layer Style> Drop Shadow and apply a shadow to make it seem like the knife was just droped.
• Next add an effect.  I used Filter> Artistic> Cutout.  Alter it to your liking.
• Next use find, download and use a "Paint Splatter Brush" and go nuts, but don't go overboard because then your image will look sloppy.
• All that's left is it just add your text.