Wednesday, 20-Jul-11 20:28:00 CEST

Lion

Lions are powerful animals. A male lion can weigh 250 kg. Compare this to the male elks in north Sweden that can weigh 380 to 540 kg up to 700 kg. I understand if your reference to heavy animals would not be a typical elk from north of Sweden but now I am writing this and for me a lion although heavy they are less impressive than elks. Anyway, the theme for this evening at Aquarelmere was lions. I sat down and scavenged, sifted and searched the Internet for a couple of nice images of lions. Look what I found! The challenge with lions is the hairs. If you set out to paint each hair you need a good portion of patience and loads of time. Another method is to use the “variotip” paint brush. It is a set of smaller brushes bundled into one brush, really clever. Actually hairy animals are tedious to paint. Even when each stroke of the paint brush paints 10 hairs you need an awful lot of strokes to paint an entire lion. At some point I had no ambition to paint the hairs and I set out to suggest the lion mane instead. It is the male lion having this impressive mane, the darker and fuller the mane, the healthier the lion.