final portrait drawings - facial expressions and postions

The image on the left is the image I drew first, the idea for this drawing came from the light experimental poses. I was trying to think about where a hyena lives and in what situation would it have light shining on it's face. So i had a think, and i thought,right a hyena lives in africa - then safari came to mind. Then I thought what if your walking down a dirt road for some reason and you hear a rustle in the bushes, you shine a touch at the location of the noise, and this bast jumps out at you. So thats the scene im trying to created.

I realised that with this image, there isn't a lot of hyena characteristics, so I looked at another picture of a hyena, and saw this image that i've been laughing at everytime I see it.

And then I remembered reading something that said that the spotted hyena is also know as the laughing hyena. so i thought i would mix the evilness of man and preditor with the laughing side. This creates an evil genius or a mentally unstable being. so the top right image is a recreation of this; wide eyes, laughing but evil mouth, hyenas large jaw, with te snout and my characteristic aswel.

I've drawn in some tall grass and leaves to look like he's jumping out of the tundra, but when i asked my family to view they all said 'it looks like he's laying down'. I guess I needed to rethink the pose. This what I came up with and I think its a lot better than the last one. I'm aware that it looks like its standing up, not jumping. put what I plan to do in photoshop is having coming over the bushes, with the light shinnng on to it from the 'torch' and possibly the sky behindto give it that extra look of being in the air. I believe that this image fights the critera more aswe, because this is a full body image whereas the last one was more to do with the top half of the body.