Lion Spider = Lider? Splion? Arachleo!

Back in April when it was still summer here in Chile and life was coming back to normal after February's massive quake, I remember seeing a mosquito-like insect on a wall. I associated it
with horses due to its rather strange shape and although it wasn't much like a mosquito I began wondering what a horsequito would look like. So I had this:


Horsequito by ~skinsvideos21 on deviantART

Yeah... so in the description I jokingly mentioned its natural predator, the Lion Spider. And here I am now, several months later with my Splion (for the lack of a better name). It was even tougher to conceive since spiders and lions share almost nothing in common anatomically. Spiders have 2 body sections while lions, uh... I'd say 3 although the difference between abdomen and 'butt' doesn't mean anything in vertebrates, does it? :3

So, here are a few sketches (I got rid of the roughest unfortunately) with roughies of the idea:



As the sketches above show, I wasn't entirely sure where the hell the legs would go (again, spiders have abdomens that don't have legs and then they have thoraxes with legs), because the way a spider's legs kinda 'spread' outwards while a lion's legs jut below the body and are parallel. So it's just experimenting while the final design was a mixture.
And well, the final (although far from perfect work) is this:

It looks a whole lot better than Horsequito (a million times!) but I'm not perfectly happy with it. That irritates me. Argh!

Click for larger image:

Learnin' to paint faces

Radiate by ~skinsvideos21 on deviantART
I've been trying around different painting programs and so far my two favourite are Paint Tool SAI and Corel Painter X. Paint Tool is simple yet versatile and fast, while Painter X is quite realistic and if used properly can be quite powerful.
Here's a progress animation on how I painted this thing: (you'll notice I started three times, I tried in Corel twice and gave up, then went to SAI and I felt it was better to start there. However, I changed my approach and started with a black and white thing first.)

Beware: it begins okay and gets ugly from there. Making art can sometimes be like making sausages, it's ugly, specially when you are just learning how to.