A couple of years ago, a co-worker of mine started suggesting that I should create a watercolor image of a leopard, and she has continued to suggest this at various times ever since. I like leopards (though my office isn’t filled with leopard skin patterned items as is her office) but I never seemed to be able to come up with an image of a leopard that I liked. I like to create images that tell a story, but I just couldn’t seem to find the story for this leopard. Finally, I hit upon the idea of a leopardess watching her young cub attack her tail. Using this as a starting point, I spent several days on my final sketch, using photo reference to change and refine the pose, the anatomy, the coat pattern (which I didn’t finish on purpose) and the facial expressions until I arrived at this sketch:
I didn’t intend to include the spots in my inked image, but rather planned on adding them with paint, which is why I didn’t complete the coat pattern in my sketch. I will admit to being nervous about the coloring process for this image because it is a more complex image than I’ve colored before. I started with the yellow-orange over both the leopardess and cub, then added the spots with a dark brown, and finished by adding shadows with a sort of blue-gray over top of both to sort of unite them. I was so relieved when I was done! I darkened some of the spots in Photoshop, but otherwise I was pleased with the result, and will be more confident about doing coloring like this in the future. Thanks for reading!