Early last year I was visiting Queen Street Gallery in Neath, South Wales, to pick up my artwork from their Open24 exhibition. They happened to mention that they were having an exhibition in the summer as part of Neath Arts Festival, and the theme was based around the Wizard of Oz and suggested that I might like to draw a lion for it – well of course I would!
The story of the Wizard of Oz is well known, and the lion character finds his courage as the story progresses. I didn’t have any reference photos of lions at the time, so I turned to my usual alternative resource for reference material, the Wildlife Reference Photos for Artists website. At the time of writing, there are over three thousand stunning lion photos on there! It took some time, but I eventually I found the perfect reference of a male Asiatic lion by Taffy Gill. The direct gaze of the lion portrayed a calm strength, which I thought was a perfect!
I’ve done other realistic big cat drawings, tigers are a particular favourite of mine, so I thought a lion would be easy, as there’s no spots or stripes in the fur. But when you really start to look, lions have SO many colours in their fur, they’re a lot more complicated to draw that I though! I decided to complete the drawing entirely with coloured pencil (I often combine them with other media), and I chose sand coloured Pastelmat as my drawing surface. I though this would make my life easier as it’s a similar colour to the lion’s fur, but in reality, it was a bit too close and made it challenging in some places to see where I was putting my pencil strokes! I always use professional grade coloured pencils, and for this drawing the Derwent Lightfast range wade a great range of golden browns and ochres that were perfect for this drawing. Of course plenty of pencils of other brands snuck in there too, I rarely sticky to one!
As always creating realistic wildlife art is not a quick process, but eventually I got there and I was pleased with the results and it was accepted into the show. My framer (Graham Anderson of Gallery Arts) worked his magic as usual and chose the perfect mount and frame – good framing is worth the effort!
I’ve also had prints and cards made, you can find them in my Folksy shop.
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