Painting Acheson/ Primeval Designs Lions

I absolutely love lions, so getting a few models and painting them up was always in the back of my mind. I recently picked up some dinosaurs and a pride of lions from Acheson creations extremely affordable site. It took me ages to decide on a colour scheme, my process for painting models as accurately as possible involves a lot of looking for pictures on google, I usually make a folder and refer to the picture I like best before picking up the brush. I'll maybe make a post about that later but it's pretty easy to get good results this way.

For the lions, I found that lionesses are very differently marked and coloured than male lions, and equally, there isn't just a single colouration for lionesses, perhaps this is as much to do with mud and dirt in their coats, or their exposure to sunlight, but they range from extremely blonde to a dirty brown colour. The mouth of a lion is quite fascinating, they have black lips, black inside their mouths, black noses, and a black mark between lips and nose. All lions have a lighter tone to their underbellies, and along their spine and on their fore flanks they have a darker colour. Their muzzle, the front of their head around their mouths are the same light colour as under their bodies, and this colour extends to their necks to just under the ears. The ears are really strange! :) They have black little tufts directly behind their ears. The tips of their tails are brown/ black too. And a lion's eyes are black, with a shiny golden/ orange colour to the centre, their irises are orange.

The male lion is darker coloured, with his mane either light or dark (and the darker the mane the more testosterone/ quality to the pride and females, the more desirable he is, but equally, the hotter and more uncomfortable he'll get in the sun, so it takes greater strength to be a lion with a darker mane). Basically the male lion is as per the lioness, but darker and their mane is obviously a distinction.

Now, you could go to much higher detail than this, but I don't care to.

I'm going to post pictures when I'm able.

I have around 300 zombies, they're almost all painted, I'll start uploading them after the lions.