Artist's Note:

The stunning, green tones of the Chondro Python (otherwise known as the Green Tree Python) make me think of precious jewels. This assosciation lead to me wanting to paint a covetous Chondro Python guarding its treasure. I was also keen to paint gold, so I set about planning and then executing this project. In doing so I used a range of tools and techniques, utilizing the digital sculpting tools in ZBrush, and the modelling tools of Blender to create a model I could light and render to use as part of my reference material. I matched this up with the reference I had chosen for the snake itself, and got started painting.

The snakes themselves aren’t the longest or the beefiest, coming in at up to 2m in length and about 1.6kg in bodyweight, so it struck me they’d fit inside some kind of ancient treasure so they seemed a good choice (on top of the colour of their scales). They spend a lot of time hanging around in trees in the rainforest. For food they mainly eat small rodents and other little animals like reptiles. They are native to New Guinea, some Indonesian islands, and the Cape York Peninsula in Australia. This was a pretty ambitious project, and I’m pleased with how it turned out. If you want to know more about them, you can find more info here.