the snake

This is an illustration from an Italian folktale I read in Italo Calvino's collection. The story is called "The Snake." It starts out with a little girl who is the only one of her sisters not to be afraid of a snake lying in a field. She eventually takes it home and puts it under her bed. (It's after the snake gives her a gift and then leaves that the story really begins.) Get a load of this wonderful, oh-so-Calvino line:

"When she got back home, she placed the snake under her bed. It grew so rapidly that soon it was too big to fit under the bed, so it went away." 

And that's what this is a picture of: when the snake is too big to fit under the bed. The ink version above is my latest version, though I'm still not totally sure it's what I want. The watercolor one below feels too static, though I'm glad I tried to make a setting.