A tall, narrow crop of the same painted figure that appears elsewhere in this gallery under a different title: a wild-haired redheaded woman, restrained at the wrists by an ornamental chain looped across her chest, twists upward in a dramatic pose above a coiled, fanged green serpent at the base of the frame. Seeing the same underlying artwork cropped and re-titled in two different places in this collection is a useful reminder of how commercial illustration gets reused and repackaged across a career; a single strong painting like this one could plausibly have served as a book cover, a print, a calendar image or a trading card at different points, each context calling for a slightly different crop or framing of the same source art. The elongated, portrait-style composition here emphasizes the vertical sweep of her hair and upraised arms, and the ornamental chain across her chest carries the same decorative, almost Klimt-influenced quality found in several of Bisley's other Celtic and fantasy-themed pieces, an unusual reference point for a comics illustrator but one he's cited directly among his influences alongside more expected names like Frank Frazetta and Richard Corben. The serpent coiled below her adds the tension and implied danger, fangs bared, ready to strike, that turns what could otherwise be a purely decorative pin-up pose into something closer to a frozen moment of genuine peril, a technique Bisley used often to keep even his more glamour-oriented pieces from feeling static.
Simon Bisley draws a red headed female
