I sketched the perfect pose of this mountain lion and jumped into working on an original piece with little planning. The result was not so great - terrible, in fact. So I did it again with more preliminary sketches and planning. This time, it came out okay but still did not generate the feeling I wanted to create with this elusive creature. The colors were too bright and the overall feeling was too open. So I used darker colors and eliminated most of the background scene. I had done a panther on black paper before with glorious results so I duplicated the idea. I used black Strathmore pastel paper and painted the panther with soft pastels.