I was scrolling through the hundreds of image files I have saved on my hard drive one evening when I came across a photo of a mother cougar (mountain lion) with her cub in the snow. This photo most likely originally came from The Animal Pictures Archive. I have had this photo on my hard drive for some time, but this evening I found myself paticularly captivated by it. I wasn't captivated by the brash little cub with it's ear cocked back, but instead by the calm collected mother concentrating on something in the distance. I saw her beauty and grace and decided I would do my best to translate it into a drawing.
I worked until pretty late that night on the rough pencil work, the darkening with a soft 2B mechanical pencil, and the clean up in the image editor. I was pretty tired after that, and left the coloring for the next day. I took my time coloring it the next afternoon, and even got to use my cream Prismacolor colored pencil which I had bought to suppliment my 50 Crayolas which lacked cream. After I was done I knew I had created something pretty special- one of my better masterpieces to date! The background photo is some Canadian landscape I found online and applied a slight gaussian blur to. I hope you all enjoy the results as much as I do.
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 and printed on fax/copy paper. The printout was colored with Crayola and Sanford Prismacolor colored pencils and the inking was done with a Pigma Micron 05 pen. The background photo and the lettering was done with Paint Shop Pro 7.02.
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