Snakes on a Plane

...Gaudy cover for a movie! Did a bit of painting for this one. Scroll down to see how it came about.
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Scroll down for a step-by-step description of how this happened.
...This was going to be the cover. I did a simple gradient and overlaid that "snakeskin" filter in photoshop. Then I squiggled in an ad-lib snake pattern on top of it and erased the edges until it matched up to the individual scales.
...I thought some highlights would be cool and I started plopping those on. As I labored over each little scale "the voice" in my head started asking me about what I was doing. I'm painting little scales, I said. The voice asked about the overall design, wasn't it a little too easy, you know, pulling that gradient trick and painting scales? Hm.
...I stood back and looked at it. I saw a big crack running diagonally across the page. It didn't say "snakes" to me
...Okay. This has been a good warm up, then. Let's do snakes.
...I tossed out the texture so it wouldn't distract me from building big coils of colorful tubing. I watched the movie trailer and they had all kinds and colors of snakes so I felt I didn't have to be too realistic with this.
...I have dreams about snakes. There are usually hundreds of them and they're everywhere. I'll open a closet. Snakes. A shoe box. Snakes. When I was a young lad I went on a bike ride next to a river, and it was a warm day and every 10 to twenty feet was a snake stretched out or coiled up on the path. I had to get off of my bike and walk slowly along the path, being careful not to tread on anybody.
...No exaggeration, I saw HUNDREDS of snakes that day. Lots of rattlers. When I dream I dream of snakes I always blame that experience.
...And when I painted this I think I was living it all over again. Had another dream about it. I should get combat pay for stuff like this.
...I searched around the web to see if I could find another technique for making snake scales that would make things a bit easier. I found one but it was for Photoshop CS2 and as I went through the step-by-step I ran into a step that I couldn't do in CS1. Maybe I just couldn't figure it out, but after spending about half an hour messing with it I gave up and decided just to use the filter like this.
...If I could do it again I'd tweak it a bit and try to get the scales to wrap around the forms; that was something I thought about while painting the patterns on the bodies. I refrained.
...I set the painted layer to multiply and put the textured layer behind it. Then, on a layer above both the texture and the painting, I painted the stripes. I sketched them on quickly, setting that layer about 50% transparent and got on with the tedious job of erasing until the edges lined up with the scales.
...It looked pretty good to me until I looked back at that first test run. The highlights on that worked nicely. Okay. So then I zoomed back in and put highlights on all the scales that seemed to want them.
...I listen to old-time radio shows when I'm doing work that doesn't require a lot of thinking– work like painting each scale on a snake-body. After about six episodes of the Shadow I awoke from my trance and decided I was done.