You have a great sense of observation but i feel you need to draw more from life and paint less so you can get rid of those stiff figure that if you would like to improving your gesture.
On the topic of the lion he feel almost comical i suspect that not the style your after from what i see you do typically i would encourage you to use more reference when you tackling something your not familiar with specially if you are not gonna do any preparatory study of subject unfamiliar to you.
Darktiste, yeah, a photo i posted is a block in, it's pretty far from what i want the finished painting to look like. There's plenty of ref material for the lion as well, it's just a beginning stage. Here's a sketch for this painting i posted last year.
Your lose the expression .The fur need a better treatment right now it goes to fast into the small detail. Not an expert on what brush might be better suited for fur in traditional painting but i suppose it most likely a ''flat brush'' with some kind of twisting motion involve to go from large clump to small clump. There probably plenty of lion painting video out there to source for brush technique.
You got really nice quality in the skin in that preparatory digital version. But i am not sure of your contrast in color so far specially the cloth it feel like you should have hit darker dark in the prep sketch. For that reason i can't really feel the ''cloth'' quality of a jean that characteristic like when a fabric is of a certain thickness and weight specially where the jean meet the shoe normally the gradient of fold as the fabric drap down onto itself at least create little more noticeability deeper fold. That would also be true of the crotch region as the fabric really build tension around there i feel it just not there yet in term of commiting enough to bring up those region to similar ''level of render'' it might be intentional i don't know how much you want to push toward realism so anyways that my 2 cent.
