Mr. M Art contest - Mythology, Horned Serpent by Antimetica

Horned Serpent - Southeastern Native American tribal mythology

I am part indian (Native American) and my tribe along with many in the southeast United States have a mythological creature called the horned serpent. The horned serpent has a lot of variations between different tribes but mine consider it not harmful to humans unless provoked.

The horned serpent is a water snake with a large crystal on its forehead. The scales on the body are prized for having powers of divination (telling the future). There are also horned serpent mythology in northwest Europe. Since I have a lot of mixed European ancestry as well like many Americans :P I liked the ram's horn motif.

This was exploratory for me as I'm not very familiar with my tribe's mythology. I looked at the wiki page and chose elements of the horned serpent I liked. It seemed a lot of people had some version of it which was fascinating to me in itself. Also I want to get back into doing art again and appreciate the chance to have fun and enjoy this exercise.

Here's my original sketch in pencil on paper and the final image above I created by scanning it in Photoshop using some filters namely inverting and photocopy and threshold. At one point I thought I would color it but I prefer to actually paint with real paint.

I found out about the contest late so I didn't feel any coloring I did in Photoshop would be satisfying hence the black and white. But honestly I do like black and white/pen and ink work very much as well.

Briefly I was inspired by the the horned serpent's food choice of sumac and read that certain kinds sumac makes a purple dye. Who knew? I am very familiar with it but only as an annoying plant that causes terrible rashes and itching like poison ivy.

But my loose style of drawing did not connect my lines up very well and it made it a bit more time consuming to color than I had anticipated.

This is an entry for the Mr. M Art Contest #5 and a part of @steembasicincome

For more information on the horned serpent read the wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horned_Serpent

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Thank you so much for reading.