Painting the Snake staff

Still haven’t recieved the plastic eyes, but went ahead and messed with painting the rest of the snake. For me, it can sometimes be an involved process to get it to look like I want the paint to look. I have some excellent reference books on snakes with great photographs, but it sometimes takes a bit to get it just right. I think I have about six or seven coats on parts of this snake, before settling on the current configuration. I ended up using a thinned wash of gold paint to get some metallic sparkles in the skin. Looks pretty good so far. The colors pop out brighter when a finish is applied and it will have a more realistic appearance (I mist it with water occasionally to get an idea of how it will appear). I’ll have some more painting to do on the head when I carve out the current eyes and insert the plastic ones. Or I may try to work on these some more? It helps to take a little break sometimes and step back a bit and think about what you want to do!

-- Mike P., Arkansas, http://mpounders1.blogspot.com