I started to sketch this picture on Thursday right after I finished the design for Burn. I just thought of one of the wonderful moments we already had together and tried to draw something similar... to express my feelings for him. I never really intended to finish it in any way, because I knew, as with all the other pictures, I wouldn't get it done anyway.

But then yesterday I felt like coloring something with my Copics again and I figured out that I got all the colors for this picture.
So then I decided to ink it in Photoshop, which has three mayor reasons:
1st: I didn't want to kill the sketch
2nd: I'm better at linearting on Photoshop than with freehand lineart on paper
3rd: the sketch wasn't drawn on Copic paper anyway
So I inked it on Photoshop and printed the lineart on Copic paper to color it.

For the coloring itself, I first base colored it, then drew on it with a pencil to mark where the shading had to be and in the end, shaded it.
I only had a few problems with the color of Cherry's muzzle and ear tips, so I had to fix it a little with colored pencils.
In the end I scanned it and fixed the whole picture in Photoshop. I erased parts where I drew over the lines, fixed some clothes (Cherry's hair color was killed by my scanner and her clothes are more of a blueish grey, but I only had regular cool grey Copics).

Then I decided to try adding (yes TRY, as to not having been able to work out anything proper on Photoshop at the moment) a background on Photoshop.
I had some night-time background in my mind and to keep it rather simple and to not overstrain myself right away, I thought of a few trees, clouds and a moon and them sitting on a wall or something, but then I thought of my favourite place at our river nearby and suddenly had the image of them sitting at the water in my mind.
So it ended up like this and as final step I played with some filters, because I wanted the background to fit the copic colored style of the characters.

Cherry the Lynx & Art ©
Burn the Lion ©