Serpent Spawn

     One day, in 2003, I sat at my desk upstairs with a pile of 3 x 5 note cards in front of me.  I was making flash cards to study with.  Sure enough, I got tired of doing so and started to sketch intertwining snakes on the card (my class partner at the time kept snakes as a hobby, hence I thought about snakes while I was supposed to be studying).  I decided to paint it, and ended up with a tiny 3 x 5 inch painting (acrylic).  Here is a scan of it:

    

     About a year later, I was in a mood to come up with some design I hadn't seen anywhere else.  I really wanted to have horses as the theme, but I was struggling to come up with anything.  I had only ever drawn horses as realistic as I possibly could.  I tried drawing a horse with a fancy long mane, with chunks of the locks of mane hair swirling in different directions.  It wasn't unusual enough.

     Then, a few days later while staring at the snake picture I had painted, I suddenly realized the snakes reminded me of the horse's mane I had drawn (sounds like a Medusa horse now, huh?).  I decided to try another drawing, this time extending the mane into serpent shapes, which intertwined randomly.  I didn't think it would look right with a normal horse body, so I pulled the body into a larger serpent shape and integrated it with the rest of the drawing.  I was pleased with the result (no picture of this one, I did it on the inside of a school folder).  I liked the design enough that I painted two of them to place over my door (they are acrylic on heavy paper, with silver paint for the detailing over the bodies).

Here is a photo of my door 'guards':

     They were my more simple earlier versions.  I made a few more of these in different colors, using colored pencils (no image of those, I never scanned or photographed them).  More recently I made a few more, in more muted colors.  One with mixed media (graphite pencils, colored pencils, watercolor pencils, and a bit of pearlescent acrylic paint), one with colored conte chalk, and one with colored pencils.  I did all of these in a 9 x 6 inch sketchbook.  Scans of them follow:

     One of the things I do for my daughter is to make line drawings for her to use as coloring pages.  One day she dictated to me that she wanted one of these horse creatures, but with mermaid tails.  She wanted a mother with a baby, too.  I quickly drew her request, and scanned it (so I could give her additional copies if she wanted any).  Here is the coloring page I made as per my daughter's request:

     I have a few more of these that I sketched, including one with a geometric design.  I'll post those in the future, if I ever get beyond sketching them, and actually finish them.