My latest drawing of a Roaring Tiger

I made this drawing today in between my portraits I'm working on. Animals is also something I want to get better at drawing. I used to draw dogs and cats alot when I was about 7-8 years old, I don't know why I stoped but it's never too late to start again.

The first thing I do is to make a rough sketch of the face and different patterns. The most important things are the eyes nose and mouth to get the porportions right. The stripes in the fur is not that important to get super accurate, all tigers have different stripes and it's kind of easy to make it look realistic anyway.

After the sketch I start filling in the dark fur and the other dark areas. I make it kind of rough because I want to build up the structure with thin lines after I get the black parts done. Before I start with the thin lines I take a piece of paper to smoth out the graphite and make a soft shade in the face of the tiger. After this is done I take my eraser and make many fast moves from the center and out inline with the direction of the fur. This is to create the depth of the drawing because not all white hairs are white.

For the thin black fur I use a mechanic pen with thin stift (0,5 mm) and make many thin lines between the black and white fur. After this I start to make the structure of the tiny fur on the nose and around the tigers eyes. I like to make the background black, it makes a certain depth in the drawing but onfortunately it's hard to photograph without reflections in the graphite. Before I'm finished with the drawing I take a white ballpoint pen and make the whisker hair on his nose and also highlight the very white hairs.

The finished result you can see below.