I am still playing around with that same beautiful photograph of a mother mountain and her cub that has now inspired at least 2 original characters and 6 drawings. I guess I am very captivated by it! I have now played with this idea across the entire character design spectrum drawing everything from a photo-realistic mountain lion all the way to a mountain lion cat woman (which is not featured on my website- sorry!) What you are looking at here is what is considered a true "Anthro" by Anthropomorphic comic purists. Even though any mixture of animal (or thing) with human characteristics is considered anthropomorphism, this is the kind of Anthropomorphism that is considered to be the "Anthro" or "Furry" drawing style which is featured in publications such as Furlough.
This version of the Mountain Lioness is a Disney Lion King style drawing mixed with Anthropomorphics. I drew this after I couldn't really deside whether to draw the Mountain Lioness in a straight Disney Lion King style or to mix the Disney style with Anthropomorphism. I had conflicting visions of character design in my head. As a result I ended up drawing both. The straight Lion King style can be seen here as "Lion King Style Mountain Lioness". This version of the Mountain Lioness took tons and tons of rough sketches in my scratch notebooks until I fealt that I had designed a character that was both true to the Disney style of drawing and pleasing to the eye. I also got a lot of help by looking at several Lion King based Anthros that were featured on the Lion King Fanart Archive. I had a hard time working out the proportions of this character because the different shaped had put me into the habit of tending to make the shoulders too broad. After I had fixed that I had the second problem of the new leg anatomy. Unfortunately it isn't very obvious in this straight on pose, but she is walking on her toes like how a real cat does. I had to readjust the leg proportions to compensate for this.
After I had finally made a rough sketch that I liked enough to darken and clean up I gave the drawing a second look over and decided the pose she was in was to generic and boring. By this time however I did not want to crumple my drawing up and start over so I darkened it and cleaned it up anyway. I was relieved tofind that the drawing looked very good after I had finished coloring it. It seems that for once a generic facing forward stance was in order, at least for the first drawing of this character. I once again used the Adobe Photoshop "Burn" tool set to burn Highlights to add the shading to this image. By the time I was done coloring and burning this image it was very late at night and I was too tired to draw my intended digital background of a snowfield and blue clouds ala "Lion King Style Mountain Lioness". So instead I did something I saw once in a fanart drawing of Felicia the Catwoman. I added a gradient bar offcenter in the background to offset the unbalanced features of the drawing (in this case the tail). This is the first time I have done this and it turned out very nice. If you include all the time I took making botched rough sketch after botched rough sketch I put some 10 hours of work into this drawing. I hope you all like looking at this gental mother Mountain Lion as much as I seem to love drawing her!
The rough pencil work was done on 80lb. medium surface Strathmore drawing paper with a .05mm mechanical pencil loaded with 5H lead. The pencil lines were darkened with 2B lead. The result was darkened and cleaned up with Paint Shop Pro 3.11 and printed on fax/copy paper. The printout was colored with Crayola and Sanford Prismacolor colored pencils and the inking was done with Pigma Micron 08 and 03 size pens. The background gradient and the lettering was done with Paint Shop Pro 7.02. The shading was done with Adobe Photoshop 6.01.
All text and original multimedia is © 2001 Daniel Keller. All other information is copyrighted by their respective owners.