the Black Leopard

I was going to call this the Black Panther, but when you search for that title you get a long list of T’challas and then after scrolling down three feet you finally get some cat. The Leopard in this case is based on the tiger skull I did, I liked it so much and learned a lot about the anatomy that I wanted to do the whole cat.

So I took the skull and posed it with the mouth slightly open. You often see big cats panting with their mouth open and their tongue out, and I like the clumsy look they get. I wanted to have the cat paws with the claws stretched out on the front paws, but retracted halfway on the feet. Together with the big teeth you get an aggressive look, and I like to use the clumsy panting face to counteract it. I would never claim this cat to be anatomically correct, as with most of my animal sculpts. I am far more interested in conveying the ‘spirit of the species’.

I added the Body, roughly like a Sphinx pose, and decided to make the head slightly too small for the body, and the paws a bit bigger than in real life. I kept the sculpture symmetricaI, and decided to pose it in a later stage.

With big cats you need to take care not to confuse the anatomy with humans. Cats have very small clavicles, so their upper chest doesn’t look human at all, and their long stretched scapulas give their shoulder that specific cattiness.