A lion head in graphite looks like a mountain of work, and the mane is the reason. This walkthrough gets around that by building the face first and treating the mane as the last layer, so you are never staring at a blank circle wondering where to start. It runs about half an hour of real drawing time.
The tutorial follows Cartooning Club How to Draw, filmed straight down over the paper so you can see the pressure behind every stroke. Two pencils do the whole job. A medium one for the construction and the face, a soft one for the darks in the mane. No blending, no shortcuts. Layers of small marks that pile up into fur.
What makes this version work is the order. Guidelines, then the muzzle, then the two circles that fence in the head and the mane. By the time you start rendering, the proportions are locked, so the fur goes on top of something solid instead of steering the drawing.
Where it goes wrong
The mane turns into a grey blob. That happens when you shade it like a shadow instead of drawing hairs. Long strokes, one at a time, all running outward from the face.
The eyes go flat. Leave a speck of white paper in each one. Shade over it and the lion stops looking back at you.
The construction lines show through. Keep them light enough to lift with a kneaded eraser before you render, which is what the creator does around the six minute mark.
Keep drawing
The same head structure carries over to a house cat at a smaller scale, and the stroke direction in the mane is the same skill as drawing hair. For another thick-coated animal, try a wolf. For the fundamentals under all of it, start with how to draw.
