(Click to enlarge.)

Is Gypsy a snake? I have no idea, but I've always thought of her as one ever since the first time I saw Mystery Science Theater in the 90's. If you're unfamiliar with the show, she was a minor character for most of the original run and only appeared every once in a while for skits. Usually you saw her in the opening credits and that was it. The reasoning was because she's the operator of the Satellite of Love ship so I guess that means she's too busy to joke around with Joel & Mike and the other bots all the time.

The robot puppet from the show has one large camping flashlight for an eye so I decided to keep the "one eye" look when doing an anthro version by giving Gypsy an eyepatch. I kept her coloration the same, even going as far as to use a photo of the real puppet to eyedrop the purple from, and then made her entire tail dark gray since the majority of her robot form is a thick black conduit cable. I used a lot of different references for this one, mostly Master Viper fanart to try and piece together an anthro snake body, and then Xenomorph art to get the segmented tail design down.

I think this one came out okay, but I feel like her nipples stand out too much. I've been trying to figure out alternate means of doing shading; on this piece specifically I did the base flats, then added the textures for scales, and then had multiple layers of 33% opacity shading placed atop each other. Previously I just did all the shading on one layer and often had conflicts with overlap. It also seemed to really burn up the available virtual memory in the program I use as I've said before this aging mid-2000's software seems like it was not meant to handle drawings with 10+ layers and both dimensions in the thousands of pixels. This new shading experiment did seem to alleviate the memory issues somewhat. I did still do things like her eye, toe claws, and nipples the old way though and because of it they kind of stand out more than I'd like. Ah well, it is still a learning experience.

This is my first finished piece of 2026. I have some other drawings in varying stages of completion, no idea what one I'll be moving to next.