This was actually a very experimental process with a whole lot of failures in all honesty. Short form of this is… 1. Tried to hand paint scales.. That was a horrible idea and they were not scaled properly to my illustrations. 2. Tried to make a scale brush??… That also didn’t pattern realistically for me. :“’D 3. Found a black and white very simple white snake scale texture that I polarized even further. I inverted it and just copied and pasted the texture and warped it all over their bodies on each illustration. This weirdly enough worked! You can see a lot of this usage in many of my snakes, especially in the black and white rougher stages. The only areas I would hand paint are the belly scales and the faces. As snake scales in these areas are pretty unique and need extra love and attention. I hope this helps a bit! 👍