Drawing snakes, and female humans - Depicting the Gorgons

 
Given that Medusa was a gorgon, and gorgons were reptilian hybrids, I did some anatomical sketches of humans and snakes. More specifically: the upper body of female humans and snakes and their textures.

I needed to become familiar with how to draw snakes. This came in two parts: The structure of the snake, and the texture pattern of the snake. Drawing the general shape of the snake is fairly straight-forward since it is pretty much a pointy cylinder. Drawing the path of the snakes helps to make the width consistent

Snakeskin textures are essentially repeated tessellated shapes. Cross-hatching and shading work best to create these patterns. The main difficulty with drawing this is the task of conforming to the path of the snakes body, which can become complicated due to pattern skew and changes in direction.


I was already particularly comfortable with drawing humans, so it generally was an experiment with attaching the torso to a snake's tail and trying to find a method to replace the hair with a crown of snakes. Drawing snake elements proved to be much easier just by drawing the path of the snake's body with a simple line. Contouring that line built the main body of the snake. Using circles helped for drawing irregular paths for snakes that fold in on themselves.

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