Animal and Wildlife Art Lessons

Wildlife Art - Lion cub in oils step by step demo

By Jason Morgan

Lion Cubs 1
First Layers

Wildlife art can seem terribly difficult for the beginner artist and often their first question to me is - "everything looks so complicated and detailed, I just don't know where to start".

Well the first thing to do is to ignore all those details, textures and colours and to concentrate on just the raw essentials (the basics).
Let me show you - Below is the beginnings of a small lion cub painting I recently did in oils - Here I have blocked in just the basic shapes with burnt Sienna, adding a little Ultramarine Blue to the Sienna to paint the darks, I then wiped some of the wet paint from the canvas for the lighter areas. As you can see this quick blocking in of tone has already given me a solid base to work upon - the canvas was then allowed to dry.

Now that the tones have been blocked in I can concentrate on adding some colour - once again I keep things very simple by blocking in just the basic colours. I start painting the background elements and work my way forward to the foreground, this allows me to overlap the nearer objects thus avoiding that cut out paint by numbers look you can get if you try to butt each edge up against another. Below I have blocked in the background and the cub in the shadows under the tree (did you notice him?).

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