Drawing a Day Challenge 2018: Day 25!!!!

HELLOOOOOOO END OF THE CHALLENGE!

I have to be honest, when I finally sat down to work on the drawing this morning, I almost started to cry. Part of it is just exhaustion from all of the work that goes into each day’s drawing, but a lot of it is I’m going to miss it so much! Thankfully I have a great project lined up to keep me busy 😉

But here he is, the final drawing of the challenge and last piece to the Hogwarts House Mascot series:

Title: Lion

Size: 5×7

Medium: Graphite pencil and white ink gel pen on acid free paper

Inspired/nominated by: It’s the last piece of my Hogwarts House Mascot series. This is the Gryffindor lion, and I did the Hufflepuff badger, Ravenclaw raven, and yes, even the Slytherin snake!

Favorite parts: Yes. Everything. I ended on a great note and am very very happy with this guy!

Challenging part: I didn’t mention this in the previous two day’s drawings, but there was an underlying challenge that I hadn’t considered when drawing the badger: not only did I have to work on the composition for each drawing individually, but I had to work on the composition as a whole. I did the badger as a landscape, but then the snake was a portrait. The raven and lion were also going to be landscape, but that was unbalanced for having all four together as a set. I then decided the lion would switch to portrait, but then having the snake look to the right (which is what was already completed) and the raven look to left would be odd unless they were both portrait. So, the raven was switched to portrait, but that left me scrambling today as the lion had to be landscape, but he fit so much better as a portrait. With a little tweaking and switching reference images, I got it to work….but it was a challenge I never expected to have and you wouldn’t even think about it when seeing the set all together:

Please excuse the poor quality for that image; they’re in their plastic sleeves so they’re protected, and there is a lot of glare on them!

Product availability: The drawing is available for purchase in my Etsy shop here; you can find it here as a print.

Which mascot is your favorite?