The Lion King Fan-Art Archive

After reading about Timira/Kirijah in the Unnofficial TLK Character Encyclopedia, I thought I'd make a design for her.

Since I could only find a meaning for "Timira", I decided to stick with that name, and have her design reflect it. However, there seem to be two possible meanings for "Timira": either "inferno" or "darkness, obscurity". After some thought, I decided to give her fur like a gray storm cloud and fiery orange eyes. Her dark ears are inspired by some concept art of cub Nala.

I think this design makes her an interesting contrast to my latest version of Chaka, which gives him bright gold fur and emerald eyes (and his name means "blazing sun").

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21:31 Mon 11/16/2009

More fun with Malka. In my first picture of him, I joked that because of his ear tufts, his dad must have been a caracal, as biologically impossible as such a thing would be. Then Takabsessed expanded on that idea, and I in turn had to draw my version of an adult Malka that was half caracal.

In fact, if you look at him in a certain way, the ear tufts aren't the only caracal-like trait he had: he also has a tail tuft lighter than his mane tuft, reddish-gold fur, and he keeps straying from his pride, as if the solitary habits of his father's species were already starting to effect him.

(No, I'm not serious about any of this.)

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21:29 Mon 11/16/2009

Adolescent Vitani, because I don't see many pictures of her at this age. The plants are flax flowers, and I included them since "flax" is one of the meanings of "Vitani" in Swahili. I doubt Disney intentionally gave a blue-eyed lioness a name associated with blue flowers, but that certainly is a fun little coincidence.

Speaking of name meanings, I recently discovered that Chaka (who was originally part of the SP script and most likely Kiara's brother) was actually meant to have a mate betrothed to him (!) named either Timira or Kirijah. Though I couldn't find any meaning for Kirijah, Timira is a Sanskrit word meaning "darkness", but there's also a male Indian name, Timir, meaning "inferno". :/

(Now where's all the Chaka+Timira art?)

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21:28 Mon 11/16/2009

I've seen Vitani's color-changing eyes discussed in various places (they are red-orange instead of blue during the branch-lighting scene). What I haven't seen discussed very much is that other characters' eyes change from red to blue -- this happens with Zira, Nuka and even Simba. To make matters worse, there will occasionally be scenes when one character's eyes are blue while the other's are still red, and vice-versa!

Zira must have some kind of weird chromosome that causes her eyes to change color like that, and Vitani inherited an "inverted" version. And since Simba also has the same trait in SP, that might mean that he...is...Vitani's...

No. No, I'm definitely not going to go there.

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21:27 Mon 11/16/2009

Of all the TLK characters we see grow from youngsters into adults, Simba and Vitani are the ones that undergo the most extreme design changes. Vitani gains ear rims while Simba loses his, Simba's cheeks go from smooth to fluffy, while Vitani's go from fluffy to smooth; Simba's eyebrows go from scruffy to smooth while Vitani's go from smooth to scruffy...and the list goes on and on.

So here's the two of them pondering what they'll look like when they're adults, unaware what the future really has in store for them.

(Kobb and Koraden have already done this sort of thing, but I thought I'd give it a shot myself.)

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07:17 Wed 11/11/2009

A guide to the cheetahs in the previous pictures, plus descriptions of a couple of characters that don't have official designs.

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06:49 Wed 11/11/2009

I've done several group pictures of various lions recently, so I thought I'd do a group picture of the most common feline species in the TLK universe besides lions -- cheetahs.

These are all of the known cheetah characters in the TLK universe (with single examples for nameless characters of which more than one appear, like the cheetahs in the TLK game). I would have included a guide to the characters in this picture, but decided I didn't want any text cluttering up the picture. I am uploading another picture which names each of them, though.

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06:44 Wed 11/11/2009

I don't think I've drawn Malka since the very first picture I drew of him back in 2006, which showed him as a cub and my interpretation of what he might be like as an adult.

I decided to draw him as an adolescent, transitioning into a slightly different adult design.

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09:45 Wed 10/14/2009

In the "Create a lion cub" section of SP Active Play, Kiara sometimes remarks that the cub you're making looks like her cousin.

I thought this comment was pretty interesting, but then Photobucket user Silver-3 suggested that the cousin in question might be Mheetu's cub, something which I hadn't considered before, so I eventually ended up drawing this.

And speaking of Kiara, here's a bit of random insanity that I put together and didn't upload here because it contains screenshots.

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11:32 Thu 10/1/2009

This picture is just a placeholder. Click here to see the actual piece.

This is a little guide to 3 of the "official" alternate universes of TLK: the movies, the books/comics, and the computer games. Since there are some serious discrepancies between the 3, instead of trying to reconcile all of those differences, I created 3 different scenarios (with one splitting into 2 alternate futures).

I also discovered that one alternate name for Chaka (Simba's son [and Shani's/Kiara's brother] in the movie universe) was Naba, according to the Unofficial Lion King Character Encyclopedia.

I guess I could've included the musical, TLK 1.5 and the Timon & Pumbaa TV series...but I didn't.

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11:28 Thu 10/1/2009

Yes, it's yet another one of these things!

It's another collection of lionesses from the SP Mouseworks storybook, scans of which were generously provided by Takashari (which you can view here). This batch of characters includes both Pridelanders and Outsiders (I don't why I was calling them Outlanders all these years when they're really called Outsiders), plus a couple of corrections I had to make now that I have higher quality scans to refer to.

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05:50 Wed 9/23/2009

Surprises, Art Trades, Requests

A thank-you picture of Scar for Takashari. She not only helped me procure some screenshots of the Simba's Pride Active Play game, but also scanned some pictures from the SP Mouseworks book (which can be viewed here). Drawing this was the least I could do to express my gratitude to her. :)

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05:45 Wed 9/23/2009

Some doodles of Vitani and Tanabi that I was compelled to do recently. This is what most of my sketches look like when they're unfinished.

As I was drawing these two, I started contemplating why I had them become an "item" in Simba's Pride: The Road Less Traveled. I hypothesized that it was probably because both of them are unusual in various ways, and because of this, they slowly became friends. I don't think I had this in mind when I was writing the story, but it's interesting to notice it now.

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01:53 Tue 9/1/2009

Surprises, Art Trades, Requests

Jabari -- a request from ghost87.

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01:52 Tue 9/1/2009

Most of us are familiar with "Dotty", "Sly-Eye", "Scruffy" and the rest of the unique Outlanders in Simba's Pride...

But what about the Outlanders featured in the various Simba's Pride storybooks? There are quite a few of them, and lots of them are even more unique than the ones in the movie. Here are just a few of them, which I found in the following scans:

Outlanders2.jpg
11.jpg
pic13.jpg
pic16.jpg
pic17.jpg

I also included some observations on the storybook versions of Zira, Nuka and Vitani.

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09:13 Fri 8/7/2009

Three more lions from the Simba's Pride Active Play game. The two on the left are a bit of a mystery, since the mother appears in the intro, the cub appears in the credits, but neither of them appear in the Lion game. I'm guessing that they are mother and son, even though their colors don't match exactly.

The lone cub on the right is from a demo of the game. He looks even more like the cub Nuka beanie tag than the cub I mentioned in my previous Active Play picture.

I also made this picture so I could post a link to a gallery full of screenshots from the game for those of you who are interested - SP%20Active%20Play/

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08:51 Thu 8/6/2009

Disney's Active Play: Simba's Pride features a number of lion cubs and their mothers. The cubs have designs that throw the TLK design "rules" right out the window: None of them have whiskers and some don't even have different colored fur around their eyes -- and their moms' designs break the rules even more!

Though Simba's generation is packed full of semi-canon cubs, Kiara's only has four cubs, all from TLK6NA. Even though this game seems to take place in a strange alternate universe where everyone is perfectly fine with letting Kovu and Kiara play together, I think it's neat to finally find some more cubs Kiara's age.

Many, many thanks to Takashari for helping me obtain screenshots and DJ Coulz for making me aware of this game.

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08:49 Thu 8/6/2009

"Look, Uru -- the golden one looks just like you."
"And the dark one looks just like you."
"He's got your nose, though."

I decided to draw the quintessential pre-TLK family portrait in order to further my mission to destroy the misconception that Ahadi is described as having golden fur in TLK:6NA. ;)

And yes, I've changed Uru's design yet again. I'm not sure if her father could still be "the selfish lion" in this scenario, since it might mean that her mom was also golden with an Outlander nose, unless she got one or both of those traits from a grandparent. Maybe I should've given her a normal nose and had Taka's nose be inherited from his maternal grandmother, but ah well.

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08:42 Thu 8/6/2009

Vidole and Kigeni

I honestly don't know if I was subconsciously imitating any particular style when I decided to draw Vidole and Kigeni like this. It's weird, whatever it is.

I included both the colored and uncolored sketch so they would be compared more easily.

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02:10 Wed 7/22/2009

Surprises, Art Trades, Requests

A scene inspired by Impressive Title: Nala_91 gets ready to fight a Monster Ray (my half of an art trade with her). The Monster Rays in IT actually don't have dorsal fins and glowing red eyes, but I just had to add them.

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05:35 Tue 7/14/2009

Simba's cousins from the comic "An Unusual Choir" having some fun with an African spurred tortoise. They only appear as babies in the comic, so I decided to draw cub versions of them. The cubs' genders aren't made clear in the comic, and I decided to make them both girls. Though their parents are clones of Mufasa and Sarabi, their fur is very scruffy, so I made sure that their cubs were somewhat scruffy as well.

Since their color schemes are somewhat generic, I tried to give them as many unique traits as possible to set them apart from their pride full of cub Simba clones. (You may notice that the gold cub resembles their mother while the tan one resembles their father.)

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10:19 Thu 7/2/2009

The TLK fan fiction "A Safe Place" inspired me to draw Simba and Nala's "original" cubs, Shani and Chaka.

Here, Chaka is supposed to be the cub at the end of TLK, while Shani has the same scruffy head she has in the early SP storyboards (and unsurprisingly resembles Kiara somewhat). I tried to incorporate features from both their parents and grandparents in their designs, as well as a couple of unique traits.

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10:18 Thu 7/2/2009

I've seen many people redrawing old pictures to see how they've improved since then, and I've sometimes speculated about doing this myself. For a while, I was never sure which old picture I could do and when I could find time to do it, then recently I realized that I've been on this archive for almost ten years now.

In light of this, I decided there was no better time to redraw the first picture I submitted to the archive. Sure, it's a few months early, but I figured, why not?

Also, even though I haven't drawn Tanabi with that little orange nose gradient for years, I decided to revive it here, because I thought it looked cute.

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10:13 Thu 7/2/2009

Based on an actual exchange of dialogue which I observed from the sidelines.

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10:10 Thu 7/2/2009

Kovu, Nuka and Vitani with the designs of their beanie versions. I also find it amusing that Vitani has more of a "mane" than either Nuka or Kovu.

Speaking of these beanies and their tags (near the top of this page), I'm growing convinced that whoever drew the tag for Nuka used only the cub Nuka beanie as reference. The picture on Vitani's tag also looks a little odd, but Kovu's looks perfectly normal, probably because the image of him was copied from a piece of clipart.

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05:38 Fri 6/26/2009

Of all the semi-canon characters I've drawn, none of their designs have changed quite as drastically as my designs for Ahadi and Uru. In fact, over the years, their designs have slowly "evolved" into ones completely different than their initial looks. Here's a little chart detailing their various changes over the years (I have been doing a lot of these sort of things lately, for some reason). Sorry about the large size.

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04:39 Fri 6/26/2009

The birds that were hitching a ride on the elephant's tusks from "Circle of Life", probably watching the ceremony from a nearby tree. The green bird with the long tail was only seen from behind in the movie, but since is a Beautiful Sunbird according to Pegasuss's East African Species List, I colored him to look like one.

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04:25 Fri 6/26/2009

I've been drawing a lot of lions lately, and I've consequently been feeling a bit guilty that I haven't been inspired to draw pictures of any other African species. Then I remembered this idea that I've had kicking around for several months...

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04:21 Fri 6/26/2009

I thought I'd do a picture of adult Kopa in a happy mood, just to show that this version of him isn't a complete gloom cookie as an adult. I also changed his chin a little to look more like Nala's.

(Wow, I had no idea it was canon week while I was working on this and the other pictures in this batch of uploads! What great timing.)

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