Fi Webster's photos with the keyword: snake

Cut-paper collage postcard, 6" x 9", 15.2 cm x 22.9 cm. Background is 19th century ledger paper: if you look in the upper left (& tip your head to the right), you'll see where the bookkeeper has written "Ditto, Ditto..." Snake by Albertus Seba (who else?). Women are angels from a late 13th century altarpiece by Giovanni Cimabue.

Cut-paper collage postcard for Illustration Friday's theme "Survival." Snake by Albertus Seba.

Cut-paper collage postcard. In this Year of the Snake, I keep finding excuses for celebrating our serpentine friends! The title means "high praise for snakes." The red-and-white critter is not a collage trick: that's a real two-headed albino milk snake. In the upper left is a Minoan snake goddess figure, circa 1500 B.C.E. In the lower right is a Greek marble relief, circa 400-575 B.C.E. The black and white snakes are from a Navajo sand painting, 1930s.

Cut-paper collage postcard created for Kollage Kit theme: "Toys." Snake drawing by Albertus Seba. Speech balloon from 1951 issue of Crime Smashers comics. "Yira 2" giant lizard toy by Go Hero (Steve Forde). "A for Awesome!" sticker from StickerBomb's alphabet book. I couldn't find a photo credit for the guy in the swimsuit.

Cut-paper collage postcard. Background text is from the entry on "serpents" in an 1880 encyclopedia, printed on handmade Thai paper with banana leaf inclusions. South American guava-tree scene is from an engraving credited to Albertus Seba, although I doubt he did the work himself. Seba was a Dutch pharmacist who set up his business next to the Amsterdam harbor in 1700. He started by asking sailors and ship surgeons to bring exotic plants and animal products he could use for preparing drugs, then got into collecting specimens of snakes, birds, insects, shells and lizards in his house. Apparently Linnaeus visited Seba's collection a couple of times and used it as part of the basis for his famous classification system. My husband is a biologist: he poured over books trying to figure out the species of the bird and snake depicted. He concluded that the bird is probably a hummingbird, but its shape isn't quite right, so it may have been preserved in a faulty way. The snake he couldn't find in any of his snake books, so either it's extinct, or else the colors are fanciful.

Cut-paper collage postcard. Robed figure from a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. Head of figure from a sculpture by François Rude. Snake from Albertus Seba's Das Naturalienkabinett . Four images on left from Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective's Scrapbook. Note added 09/30/18: The scan of this collage is faulty in one area. See the peculiar orange bar up and to the right of the figure's foot? That's the end of a dark block of wood with nails in it, because the figure in Bosch's painting is Jesus carrying the cross while walking on boards of nails, like mortification sandals his foot is slipping off of. The wood plus nails are so dark, they disappear into the black background. I'll see if I can figure out how to enhance that area, but since I mailed out the original as a postcard, it may be a lost cause.

Topo map from Carroll (thanks!), coppery arms part of a Spanish statue of the Marquis de Sade, assorted clippings from magazines & catalogs.

This was for the Day & Night handmade postcard swap. I started with a notion of daytime vs. nighttime predators. When I found the desert background in a discarded magazine, I settled on a hawk & a snake, then desaturated the "night" side. The sun & moon are from a terrific compendium of graphics--Alexander Roob's Hermetic Museum: Alchemy and Mysticism.

I don't have anything in particular to say about this one, except that I really enjoyed cutting out the snakey bits.

The simplest collage I've ever made--it has only 2 pieces. The background is from Jeffrey Becom's photo "Pink Facade (Fachada Rosa)," taken in Teopisca, Chiapas, Mexico. The gold snake is from a Smithsonian jewelry catalog: it's part of a design based on an Egyptian cuff bracelet.