Saturday, January 8, 2022

Lioness Drawing from My Safari Trip

In October my husband and I were fortunate to go on an African safari  and travel to to five wildlife preserves in Kenya and Tanzania. It was an amazing trip and I came home with an incredible amount of wildlife photos. Covid made it a little more difficult to travel however we were tested frequently and wore masks indoors. And we were mostly riding in open air safari jeeps in the company of more animals than people. 

We had just landed in the Maasai Mara Wildlife Reserve and were traveling by jeep to our camp when we came across four sleeping lionesses near the side of the road. We pulled up quite close and sat watching them for close to an hour (they are so used to safari jeeps it is possible to get that close). They rolled around a bit, yawned, got up and spun around (just like a house cat), laid back down and went back to sleep. I was taking photos and just happened to catch this lioness with her eyes open looking at me. 

Here are three stages of the drawing that I created from my photo. I worked with Faber Castell Polychromos on Clairefontaine Pastelmat paper, Maize colored (pictured below). The Pastelmat has a textured but velvety surface to softly layer the pencil. The Polychromos are a harder oil based pencil that adhere to this surface and blend very easily. I was able to apply multiple layers of color to different areas.

The Pastelmat comes in several colors and I am anxious to order and try a variety of them. 



 



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