Like father, like son… BUT IN REVERSE!

The inception of this one came from, what else, a conversation I had with QueenNalaTheLioness. It’s been forever since I’ve drawn cub Simba and Nala, so she wanted to see me draw them playing in the water together. I already had a pre-existing idea of them playing with a baobab fruit, mostly as a parallel to when Kion and Bunga did it in The Lion Guard’s pilot. So we put the two together, and this was the result. I thought it would be utterly adorable to see that Simba and Nala played the same type of games that their son would someday play too. I’m a complete sucker for callbacks and parallels and things like that.

I especially love how the water came out in this, but ironically it happened by total accident. I was screwing around with the dodge tool when I lit up some of the water near the center by mistake, and I almost undid it completely. But seeing it made me think it looked just like a reflection of the sun, so it quickly grew on me. Then I also remembered how I used the same technique on ‘I Thought You’d Never Ask’. So I fucked around some more, and it stuck.

Let me know in the comments what you think!