Plymouth-based illustrator and graphic designer Beth Bennett is a fairly new face in the creative industries, having only graduated last year in 2024, but one of her recent projects caught our eye, and we just had to know more.
The work in question is Bennett’s Snakes with Legs museum series, which reimagines classic artworks with snakes (yes, you read that right). Of course, seeing Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic Mona Lisa and The Last Supper depicted in this way is hilarious. Still, Bennett explains how it taught her a lot about background painting techniques and encouraged her to experiment with different brushes.
She says: “The combination of studying traditional art and giving it a playful twist was incredibly fun and helped me push my style to the next level.
“Arms play a key role in expressing emotion and action, so creating a design without hands has pushed me to think outside the box.” For example, when redrawing the Pulp Fiction poster, Bennett had to figure out how to depict the snakes with legs holding things in a way that still looked accurate and natural.
This involved taking her work off the page and into the physical world through clay models, which helped her to understand anatomy and perspective. As you can imagine, this experimentation made the process even more enjoyable and rewarding.
“It’s been an absolute game-changer,” says Bennett. “I also have a rule to never settle for a sketch I’m not happy with, and I’ll keep tweaking and reworking it until it feels just right.”
Before Snakes with Legs was even an idea, Bennett painted more traditional subjects in her childhood. Some of her earliest memories are sitting in the garden with her grandma, sketching birds and chatting about flowers. “My grandma was an incredible artist—our house was filled with her beautiful Biro bird drawings, which I admired so much,” she remembers.
On weekends, Bennett would spend time with her grandad in his home-built studio, learning about watercolours and painting landscapes of dainty trees while he shared stories about his adventures skiing and sailing. It was these small moments that Bennett felt really shaped her as an artist, as she came to see it as a medium for connecting with loved ones and telling stories.
“I think that’s what drew me to illustration because one image can tell so many stories, open to interpretation, or it can present a vision so clear that it helps people see things in a new light,” she says. “It’s endlessly inspiring.”
Bennett has explored many styles over the years, taking inspiration from all sorts of techniques, from watercolour and anime to graphic novels and cartoons. Then, during university, Bennett fell in love with Midnight Gospel, started rewatching SpongeBob SquarePants, and began experimenting with unique character designs, like tree people and pig-like dragons.
“I realised if an idea made me laugh, I wanted to draw it,” she says.