Hi, my name is Mark Henn.
I've been an animator for the Walt Disney Feature Animation Studios for almost 40 years now.
Over that time, many of the characters I've had the chance to animate have been princesses.
But I've also had the chance to animate characters that were not human or princesses.
A lot of dogs and cats and mice And other animals.
In fact, even a mouse named Mickey.
But today I thought it would be fun to draw one of my favorite characters who wasn't a princess was actually a prince who went on to become a king.
That is Simba.
Let's draw Simba together.
Okay, let's get started.
As with most of our characters, we start with a circle, and Simba and this particular pose is no different.
And remember, don't be confused by all these little scratchy lines that I do.
Artists often like to kind of feel their way through a drawing.
It isn't so perfect the first time out.
Alrighty, so now we have the circle and again, thinking volume a round shape, a ball.
And to this now we're going to add a shape down here, it's going to make it look kind of like a light bulb.
We're going to do this, going to bring this down like this, kind of make like a light bulb shape.
All right.
All right, next, let's kind of just lightly I'm going to lightly indicate a division line here, on the top part, and then not the bottom of the circle, but up just a little bit from the circle about oh, maybe a, I don't know, a quarter of the way up, we're going to kind of draw, again, these are often called construction lines.
and we're going to draw a line like this just to kind of indicate where the eyes and the base of the nose are going to be located.
Okay, so we've got our light bulb, we've got our construction lines here down the middle, and kind of across here.
So the first thing that I want to do is try to determine the width of Simba's nose, and he has a fairly broad nose, So I'm going to try to go equal distance.
I'm just giving myself some little, little marks to indicate approximately the width of Simba's nose.
And then from there I'm going to draw these arch shapes.
And these arch shapes, are kind of the the orb or the eye mask of Simba.
If we were doing this in color, this is not his eyeball.
This is the shape this would be, you know, in a real animal or a person, this kind of arch shape is created by the, the skull underneath the the orbital opening of where your eye sits in.
Okay, so we've got these arch shapes like this.
Alright, so now let's go ahead and put the eyeball in and the bottom of these is going to be course right along here where we've already indicated, but the eyeball itself, will kind of sit just on there and it's a smaller kind of a teardrop shape.
And you'll notice I came down here and gave it a fairly strong tear duct and if you look at a real lion, they have very pronounced dark, tear ducts.
so we're going to do the eyes like this, okay? And we'll come back to the details on that later.
Okay.
So now, let's add the nose.
So we know that the bridge of the nose is approximately this width now.
And we're going to use the bottom of the circle, where we're at here, and kind of figure, approximately halfway between the bottom of where the eyes are and the bottom of the circle, we're going to come across and make this kind of S shape.
Here, this is going to become the end of Simba's nose.
Like that.
All right, Now we're also going to continue down, follow the centerline here, we're going to come down to the tip of his nose, and we're going to do a dark line here, which indicates the split of his upper lip.
And again, if you look at a real lion, tiger, a big cat, that's a fairly prominent shape, pretty prominent line actually, on their face.
Okay, so now let's go ahead and rough in the upper lip.
And we're going to kind of do a little “S” kind of an “S” shape, shape this way, this indicates where that upper lip connects into his cheek and we'll add his cheeks here in just a moment.
So we're going to go a little outside of that upper ball, a little below that halfway line, split, and come back up so you get a shape like this.
All right, And then don't worry about if you still see these construction lines here, we'll come back and we can erase those out.
Later.
Get my eraser out here ready to go Okay, so let's go ahead and add his cheeks so, about right here where this arch kind of intersects the circle, the original circle, we're just going to kind of build out a little curvy shape here to indicate the shape, the mass of his cheeks.
And we'll kind of connect it maybe about halfway to the upper lip here like that.
The other thing to remember is that he's a furry creature, so if you want to just kind of add what we call some sawtooth shapes, like this, just to kind of indicate some fur you could go ahead and do that.
Now let's go ahead and rough in his lower jaw or his chin, and you have two choices, you could leave, leave his mouth closed like this and a closed mouth smile, or you can open it which is what I'm going to do.
So I'm going to just come down here and do another kind of curved line like this to indicate his lower lip.
And again, we'll just kind of reinforce, I'll give a little free texture to his chin like that.
Okay, so he's got to have an open mouth grin and when he has an open mouth, of course, you can see his teeth so he has large upper teeth they are kind of wide sets.
And then his lower teeth you can indicate one or two or a couple, a grouping of teeth like this below.
All right, now let's come back to the eyes.
One of the things that we often do at the studio when we are dealing with real animals like this, is we'll bring in experts and in their field, whatever the subject matter is, in the case of our research for Lion King, of course, we had experts who knew all about lions and African animals.
And one of the things that I learned that was most interesting was this white patch that sits underneath the eye and it's kind of a triangular shape.
like this it fits and attaches right with that tear duct is and it goes right across the bottom and it's a white, whitish patch.
This upper arch is going to be a slightly, for our design, a slightly darker color than the fur of his rest of his body in his head.
But this lower triangular shaped patch here is a whitish color and that's there for a reason.
And we learned, and I learned that that helps lions to see at night, the reflected light that's available is reflected off of this white patch into their eye and that helps them have incredible night vision, which I thought was very interesting.
And of course, as a result, we knew that that was something important to make sure we had in the design of Simba.
Alright, you see me keep playing around wanting to add eyebrows to the very top of that the upper arch here.
So you can do that just kind of a dark thick shape here.
You can kind of color it in a little bit as you go.
That's where his eyebrows are, and they again, sit, anatomically speaking, this would be right where the, the brow ridge on the skull would be.
Alright, so we got his eyebrows and now let's go ahead and come back to the eyes.
So this is the eyeball.
And his eyeball, of course is made up of the larger circle is the iris, smaller circle is the pupil, and the tiniest is the highlight.
So you can go ahead and add those in like that.
And we'll just again just with you know, thickening up this upper line here to suggest eyelashes you can do that.
Not too too frilly, we want him to stay Simba, not become Nala.
Alright, you can darken shade in these eyes a little bit, the pupil, of course will be the darkest part Like that.
All right.
Now he's got some eyes and he's looking at you.
All right.
Let's go back in here and let's add another major feature which is his ears and his ears are going to attach about halfway where the cheek is and they're just they're large ears like this.
And they kind of attach like this And again, I'm going lightly and then I'll come back and hit it a little darker.
And then the inside shape of the ears, we're going to bring it down and attach it pretty much right where this cheek connection is right here like that.
And again, you're always making adjustments let's add the other ear, like this, His upper inside part of the ear his lower part of the inside of the ear.
Like that.
And again, this lower part of the ear was a darker color again, that was inspired by what we saw in real lions and real lion cubs, as we did our research for the film, okay, and of course Simba is a young male lion and he's kind of an adolescent and eventually he's going to grow up and have this beautiful head of hair or a mane.
And so but for now, he's just got this little kind of tussle of hair on top and we'll just kind of rough that in like this.
Doesn't have to be too pretty should look like a tussle of hair like he just got out of bed.
All right, now let's come back and finish the nose up.
Let's add the nostrils.
So, which are kind of these little arch shapes, which come down and kind of make a little nice little point to the end of his nose like that.
The top of the nose is kind of this “S” shape, almost like an upside down bow like on a bow and arrows, and you can shade it in the whole nose and like the eyes, the nostril is the darkest part.
So you can darken those in a little bit more it helps.
And you can also shade in the mouth if you want.
like that just to give it again some depth like this, we're just kind of reinforcing some of our lines.
Let me get my handy dandy eraser here and we can kind of start rubbing out taking out some of those construction lines that might be bothersome to some.
Here we go, we can just kind of take some of those out.
All right.
And now the very last thing we want to do is add his whiskers and that's also another very important part of a lion or a big cat, any cat, really big cat or even your house cat.
Part of their anatomy is the whiskers.
So we're going to give Simba, some whiskers on this side, we'll do four on this side and then we'll do an odd number over here so it's not perfectly symmetrical.
But whiskers are another important part of a cat big cat that helps them also get through nighttime they can kind of feel their way they kind of they're like little little bits of radar out there for them to kind of sense what's going on in the world around them.
Anyway, and that looks like that's about it, I'd say.
I think other than color That looks like a Simba to me.
Thank you for tuning in.
I hope you've enjoyed drawing along with me and keep drawing and we'll talk to you the next time.
Bye!.
