Lion drawings are popular judging by a bit of market research that I have carried out. Onlypenci.com do tutorials, an example of which is drawing the eyes of a tiger with a pencil in great realism.
It is no surprise that drawing the lion is popular. The lion is magnificent. However, without wishing to put a dampener on things, we love to admire the lion but sadly cannot get to grips with how to preserve it and stop killing it! It is a most disfunctional situation. The lion is considered “Vulnerable” under the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species assessment.
The lion lives in Africa and in an area that is a small part of north west India (the Asiatic lion lives there in very low numbers).
The lion has a plain unspotted coat suited to living on the ground in wide, open plains such as the Serengeti National Park. This is in contrast to leopard spots.
There is a big debate going on as to whether the lion would beat a tiger in a head to head fight. This is a fictional fight as these two top predators live far apart. The lion in African and the tiger in Asia. Although there have been some fights in captivity.
The consensus is that the tiger would win, on average. But in reality, if the two did occupy the same range and habitat they would almost certainly keep apart as best they could to maximise the chance of survival.
Many years ago….I built a page about two artists who, amongst other artwork, create lion drawings. You might like to see the page: Big Cats Limited Editions.
Creating Lion Drawings
Before signing off, some visitors might be searching for advice on how to create high quality lion drawings.
Two sources probably provide the best tutorials:
- Video
- Books
I think one of the difficulties in drawing a lion’s face is to avoid giving it human features. I have seen this quite a lot particularly in old drawings and paintings – The Anthropomorphism of Wild Cats and Domestic Cats.
Here is a nice video on how to create a lion drawing that I have selected (please note: sometimes videos go blank because someone pulled it off YouTube. I don’t get notice of this, I am afraid). This is a digital drawing but it looks like he is using a pencil almost.
