How to Draw a Cartoon Lion

Danny Green: Hi, I am Danny Green, I am a teacher and an illustrator and a cartoonist here at the Gilded Page in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We are in the classroom here and today, we're going to learn to draw a cartoon lion. Lions are fun to draw because you have the nice big mane at least in male lions anyway, where we're going to draw this big, super mane first, draw the big round, round shape of that, sort of draw in quick strokes kind of indicate fur.

We'll draw his eyes there, add nose there at the reference point and draw little round shapes for the ears there, little ears sticking out. Lions have kind of a squarish face. So, we'll kind of draw a square for a little part of it there. Draw his front paws there, big massive paws of big lion here. We'll have him standing up here, kind of like MGM lion, back part of the legs here and then taper it little more to get some paw. Draw the tail here, a little snaky shape for the tail and terminate little tuft there. There we are, we have our outline then for a cartoon lion.

We'll go to put an ink line on it. Again a brush pen filled with the waterproof ink. Tufts are here at the top there. Nice big round eyes for lions and kind of squarish head, squarish head is the end part of it. Give it a little heavier here to indicate some shadow and back into the paws here, massive paws, massive paws on a big cat. More or less it will take the same strokes we have here, just little quick strokes for the lion's fur here and a little tuft there at the end for the tail and sneaking down to the rear there.

Draw little shapes for the ears, fluffier whiskers there. Now next, we are going to move on to adding some color. I am using similar coloring scheme that we did to the horse, we're going to add some yellow to the body of him here. Cats are kind of more yellowish, not pure yellow but add some here. Now we're going to add some brown as well, blend those two colors together, it will blend out to a nice tan and add just a touch of brown here.

Just round in the shadow areas, just give it some form and also we'll add maybe a touch of red too to it just to give it a little more reddish feel just a bit and pretty lion like. So next we'll take our pencil stump we have here and we'll start moving color around, just we've blended colors more here so I am going to make sure we blend it in nicely. So make sure we get all the color distributed and blend it around nice. The browns and the yellows making a tan kind of. And there we are, there is our cartoon lion. Please stay around for the next video, we are going to do another beast of the jungle, we're going to do the giraffe.