Lion WIP

[Pyxis]

Ok, so I was working on this today, so I thought I'd get some feedback. The picture sucks though. I'll try to get a better one tomorrow, but I figured some of you would get enough of what was going on to maybe give me some pointers. This is from one of those old drawing games that were posted....oh 3 years ago. Wow that's a long time. So here it is. Thanks.

[*Deirdre*]

Hi Pyxis! Can you tell us a bit more about it? Medium, size etc?
It looks as if you have quite a bit to finish! I can't type and see the pic..so I'll post it and edit agin!
Was it done on wet paper with water-soluble graphite?

[Jolanta]

Interesting techinque. It looks wet to me too. Can you tell us some more how you do it? I want to know the secret I l i k e i t !
Jolanta

[Pyxis]

Well it's just in my sketch book. It's 4h, 2b, and 2h. It's dry. I'm just making small lines and blending them as I go. I know there's a lot of work that needs to be done, and I'm about 4 hours in. I tried it when it was first posted as a drawing game here 3 years ago. It's really my first attempt at fur, so I'm just trying to "feel" my way through it.

[aaces]

You achieved this look with just blending ?!?!
I'm very impressed. I too thought it was a "WET" technique.
Can't wait to see more.

[aaces]

OH........... almost forgot.........
what color paper is this on? It appears to be tinted....
Or is it from the picture taking process?

[Pyxis]

It's on white paper. It's dark here now, and I don't have good light. In the morning I'm going to take a better pic and see if that helps. I'm sure it won't look the same. Like I said it's one of my first attempts at fur.

It's in a Bienfang sketchbook. Size is 8 1/2 x 11.

[Jolanta]

I see. Now when you go to those long fur hair, make longer strokes and try to keep the direction of strokes consistent with the direction of the fur growing. Take a good look at the ref. and you will see. I like to use sweeping motion - back and forth doing fur. so the strokes have a nice ends Pay attention to the values, where is the dark and what shape is it. Where is lighter values and what shape is it. Try to do it as best as you can and show it to us.
Jolanta

[chaz]

I think is actually pretty good. my only suggestion is make the whisker shapes much thinner, they are a bit thick at the moment. The shading on the face is perfect as far as I can see from this post. The face hair is short and lies close to the skin on a lion's face. The longer hair is in the ruff around the face. The body hair is also short generally speaking, but sometimes it can get a Little grubby, at least in some of the pictures I've seen. Jolanta gave you some pretty good advice about creating hair. I do about the same myself, but we all have little methods of our own to get that fur look. Another suggestion I might make is not to get heavy with the blending the fur. That tends to destroy the detail and the fine dark lines that define the shadows of the clumps or the individual hairs. I use a hard pencil like an H5 or H6 to blend whenever I have one lying around. The harder pencil pushes the softer graphite into the grain of the paper, but doesn't add much color to the drawing. You can really make things pop with that approach.

nice start. Looking forward to see more.

Chuck

[Jolanta]

Thanks Chuck, never tried going with hard over soft pencil, have to play with it.
Jolanta