What you are looking at here is the fruitition of all my practice at drawing Nala from The Lion King. Originally, the only reason why I started drawing Nala was to learn the style so that I could draw a cartoon version of my original "Mountain Lioness". The Disney "style" I was used to doing was the style from Disney's The Aristocats, and even though I have designed some characters using that style including a cheetah I didn't think the style suited a cat as large as a mountain lion. So learning the style from The Lion King was a natural second choice. In all reality however, I ended up using the original photo of the mountain lion more than any Lion King screen shot to do the character modeling. I made this decision based on the fact that the cheetah shown in the "Circle of Life" sequence of the movie showed only slight resemblence to the lions shown throughout the film. This was enough to prove to me that the original Disney character design was based more on the animals true appearence than a concrete set of rules.
Most of the work of the drawing was done over the course of one lazy day. All but the coloring and the creation of the background was done on the first day. I once again used a combination of both Prismacolor and Crayola colored pencils on this drawing because a complete set of Sanford Prismacolor pencils is way out of my budget. Besides, I like the Crayola pencils much better than the over-priced Prismacolor pencils anyway. The only thing that Sanford has going for them is more available colors (such as cream which was used in this drawing) that Crayola doesn't have.
The snow and the sky in the background was created by me on the computer. This is my second serious attempt at digital coloring (the first being the background of the drawing "Ocean Heat".) I feel I did a lot better job this time around. The sky was created with both gradients and a 15% opaque white airbrush in Paint Shop Pro 7.02. The lioness and the snow had a weak Paint Shop Pro 7.02 lighting effect applied to it, but most of the shading came the 5% highlight "Burn" tool from Adobe Photoshop 6.01. I was impressed with Photoshop's burn tool after it's surprising results on my second drawing of Nala. I think I'm starting to get the hang of it! So do you think my Mountain Lioness is ready for a career with Disney? Yeah, a bit of wishful thinking on my part, but some Disney reps are coming to my school soon and this drawing will be near the top of the stack of what I show them!
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 sky and the lettering was done with Paint Shop Pro 7.02. The shading on both the character and the snow 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.