I spent a lot of time on this one. I was originally gonna do ink but seeing the subtle shades I ended up doing pencil, and then black pencil crayon, and then some white ink.
I began with some very simple lines and figuring out the proportions. Also I gotta say Snow leopards are gorgeous.
This was when I realized the eye on the right side of the page was not quite where it was supposed to be.
And now I fixed it. And did some stuff for shading.
Then I shaded the nose. I find with pencil darks really need to be built up. Just pressing hard deosn't work as nice.
Lighting change! Did more of the shading on the chin and realized the chin wasn't right.
I got really into it and forgot to take pictures for quite a while.
I felt like I had taken this as far as I could with pencil. Getting truly black with pencil doens'treally work so this was when I went in with a black pencil crayon. I have Faber Castell polychromous which are in my opinion the best pencil crayons out there.
As you can see the darks are much darker.
And Now for the piece de resistance WHITE PEN. This makes the eye go from flat to round, and makes the whiskers look awesome.
And Done.
honestly though, I probably could have worked on this for forever just playing with details.