Leeroy Lion with the mash potato mane (#5)

OK, it’s early Monday morning… thought I better knock this one out now as work will be hectic this week as it is most weeks!

This drawing was done on 24th January, 2011 at 7.05am. It was completed in 20 minutes.

So, the story behind Leeroy Lion with the mash potato mane. I really dig Dick Bruna books… always have. I love his simple style and bold colours. I was reading a Miffy book to my daughter Neave a few nights ago and thought it would be cool to do Bruna-style character of my own. Luckily this thought stuck in my head and I remembered it! Now, I’m not comparing my skills to Ol’ Dick’s. As you can see the inspiration from his style is there in this drawing but this is my own take.

Now, most of the time it takes me ages to get animal faces right, but for some reason I can do lions pretty easily… only a few shapes and it looks pretty good so I began with a lion’s head. I was drawing away and was trying to make the lion not too scary as this was meant to be a fake children’s book character after all. As I was drawing his mane started to look “sloppy” and reminded me of mash potato – Mash Potato Mane! I LOL’d and got to refining the look and adding in some colour.

At this point i was about 17 minutes in and I really wanted to hand draw the helvetica text but to be honest it looked like crap so I ended up using the proper font… lazy I know, but I wanted to knock this off in 20 minutes. And the name Leeroy? Sometimes, for a laugh I call my little brother Liam, Leeroy. He also happens to be Neave’s uncle and her favourite person in the world, so this drawing is a bit of a dedication to Liam and Neave’s friendship.