I am a retired conservation biologist and I like snakes. To me a rattlesnake is not just a scary animal but also beautiful and powerful.
Inspiration: I have had a rattlesnake head design for years. The inspiration for a full snake came with a recent hotel stay. The cleaning staff had folded a diamond at the end of the toilet paper. To me, it looked like a rattlesnake head. I left the hotel room the next day with a toilet paper rattlesnake model. But it was seeing Peter Engel’s snake design folded from a rectangle that gave me “permission” to fold legitimate origami from something other than a square.
Paper: The model requires a piece of paper with a light and dark side and a length about 14 times the width. I have been using dark and light unryu paper cut from 35-inch-wide sheets. Both the light and dark paper are cut to 2.5 by 35 inches and then laminated together using methylcellulose. The result is great for wet folding the snake into a variety of poses. For practice, folding a straight snake, you can cut a regular piece of 9-inch origami paper into three 2-inch wide strips and tape or glue them together.
You can see more of my origami on my website.