'Watching You'

My apologies for the quality of the images on this page, they are simply photographs taken with a digital camera as the work progressed.

The basic layout is drawn out very lightly and some work is then done on the male lions face to start giving it some definition. There is no foreground or background detail drawn in at this stage, I like to add this once the drawing has taken a bit more shape.

A bit more work done on the male lions head. Once I am happy with the values on this main focal point of the drawing I will use this as a tonal guide for the rest of the drawing.

 

Here a good bit more work has been done on the head of the adult male lion. As with any drawing it's the use of light and shade that gives the drawing definition. Here on the lions mane the darker areas are carefully drawn in using many single strokes of the pencil to mimic the way the hair is hanging in each particular area. This takes a lot of time, but the combination of the differences in colour tone and the direction of the strokes of the pencil all help to give the desired effect.

Now most of the structure of the male lions head, mane and most importantly, the eyes are roughly in place, I can now crack on with the body. I'll leave the head as it is for now until the rest of the drawing is in place, finishing off and balancing the final very darkest tones when the rest of the drawing is all done to this stage.

More work done on the mane, softening the pencil work and playing about with the some of the darker tones as more of the drawing is completed.

Started working on the cubs here. The brief for this drawing was for an adult male lion and two cubs, one cub older than the other just to make it interesting. So numerous reference pictures were lifted from the internet and used to make up this composite drawing. The problem with that is that the direction of the light sources for the various images were all different, so the shadows needed to be improvised to match those of the main figure, the adult male. Normally I try to work from top to bottom and left to right on my paper, so as to reduce the chance of smudging my work (I'm right handed), but here I preferred the look of the older of the two cubs for some reason and decided to do him first.

Here with a bit more work done on the first cub he's starting to look a bit better. Again, here I'm just using very small strokes of a very sharp 2H pencil to form the shape of the cub, always using the strokes of the pencil in the direction that the fur is naturally laying at the point I'm working on.

Once the first cub is pretty much worked in, initially with a very sharp 2H pencil, then with a very sharp HB pencil for the darker areas, then it's time to start the second younger of the two cubs. This one doesn't have such a defined well developed shape to it's head, so it's not so appealing.................or should that be 'easy', to do.

Second cub is pretty much drawn in here - but still some finishing to do on him yet. Then I will finish off the adult lion and balance up the shadow. It's simply the foreground and background to do then - and it's done.

Well, here we have the classic mistake of looking at something for so long that you can't see the obvious right before your eyes! I knew there was something not right about the second cub here but could not see what it was - now having left it for a day or so it suddenly seems so obvious. In my attempt to make the difference in the ages of the two cubs obvious I tried to emphasize the fluffier appearance of the younger (second) cub. In doing so I got carried away with the shadow detail and lost track of the basic shape and proportions of the face - ending up with something looking more like the Cowardly Lion off of 'The Wizard of Oz' than a lion cub, not good! So time to try and sort it out.

Okay, having reworked quite a bit on the second cub it now looks a little better. I had made the head too tall, the right ear too small and the right side of the face was not drawn in properly - added to that the highlight and shading on the nose was wrong too. All in all loads of mistakes - but mostly it is looking better now. The lesson to learn here - Sometimes you just have to leave work alone for a while and come back to it to be able to see where you are going wrong. It's still not as as I'd ideally like it to look, but it's a little better here.

An overall image of the work so far. Still got a lot of work to do on the adult male lion and much of the main shadow work still to do after that, but this will go in when all the lions are complete. Then the foreground and background detail will go in to balance the whole drawing up.

Most of the lions are now drawn in. The first real shadow tones are put in to try and tie the three lions together into one 'believable' complete image. The next step is to draw in the fore and background - this will give the figures something to rest on instead of floating in mid air and the background should throw the figures forward and give the whole drawing some depth.

At this stage the client I was doing this work for decided that he liked it just as it was without any foreground or background drawn in, so the this was how the drawing was left. I would have preferred to have at least some foreground interest in the picture to 'ground' the lions, rather than have them floating in mid air, but at least with the pictures I took as the drawing progressed, it created a record of how the drawing developed to this stage.

I hope that this has been of some interest.

 

 

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