Art Stuff - Tiger Study Sketch

I've never drawn a tiger before and this one isn't perfect. He has an extra stripe where he shouldn't have one. I could sit here at the keyboard and pick a heap of holes in this drawing but I won't. Sitting up half of last night looking at drawings of cat anatomy made me realise just how incredible this family of animals really are. At this rate I'll end up with a cat blog with maybe the odd chicken or something thrown in.I'm kidding here. Drawing cats I have found is very very challenging. More so when it's a member of the cat family with stripes or spots all over the place. Some have a multitude like the jaguar and others like the Snow Leopard have a few less to sketch out. I realised from some of my reading lately that once at the beginning of the 20th Century there used to 100,000 tigers in the wild. Now it's estimated that number is down to a mere handful at 3,500 remaining animals and dropping
Images like this of the gentleman hunter who so proudly shows off his tiger you don't see anymore. Thank goodness. Now it's the turn of the poachers to do that damage fueling a black market trade based on pure myth and superstitious beliefs thousands of years old. Let's hope that in a 100 years time we will still have our tigers living in the wild and not just in zoos or private collections.