Earlier this year I was lucky enough to visit The Big Cat Sanctuary for a day organised specially for artists. I love to create original drawings of big cats, (along with all the other animals of course!) so I was very pleased to get the opportunity to visit this fantastic facility, nestled in the Kent countryside. After a talk about the sanctuary, their gorgeous residents and an update in the Big Cats in Crisis project, we had a couple of hours to wander round with our cameras. All I can say is it’s a good job I bought a bigger memory card!
It was a lovely sunny day, and as I walked round, I could see four beautiful white lionesses snoozing in the sunshine on their platform, it was quite a sight! I took SO many photographs that day, but back at home the white lionesses really stood out. Scrolling through them, I noticed that in one shot, one of the lionesses was having a sneaky peak out of one eye – I just had to draw her!
I knew I wanted to add a background in PanPastels, with the drawing in coloured pencils, so I chose to use Pastelmat for my drawing surface. For some reason I chose light grey, which in hindsight wasn’t the best choice as it was hard to see the initial layers of coloured pencils, as the colours in her fur were so pale and delicate!
As work on the drawing progressed, I decided I wanted the background to be blue, so tried a few options in Photoshop and settled on a vibrant Phthalo blue - one of my favourite shades in the PanPastel range.
It’s always a little scary adding the background to an artwork after doing so much work on the actual drawing, but I was pretty pleased with result – I hope you like her too!
As for the title that I chose for this original artwork – “Rise Again”? It’s taken from the song “Little Fighter” by the 80’s rock bank White Lion, see what I did there?!
If you’d like to see more of my wildlife art, please visit the wildlife gallery on my website.
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