Should my Lioness be a Cheetah?

11/17/2022

I am not happy with my lioness, for two reasons. First, I think she's too plain. Her yellow colors are similar to each other, and their saturation is similar to the blue sky. And second, I already have a lion, and I want a greater variety of species. So I look for stock photos of leopards and cheetahs, to see if their silhouettes and face shapes are similar enough to give my lioness a change of species. What do you think?

(Unless otherwise credited, I took all the pictures in this post. The lioness paper piecing pattern is available on Etsy.)

Paper piecing pattern from JoeJuneandMae, sewn by me.

Photo by Jean Beaufort. License: CC0 Public Domain; click for download page.

CHEETAH OR LEOPARD?

The easiest way to distinguish a cheetah from a leopard is that cheetahs have black "tears", like a woman crying with dollar-store mascara running down her face. (Cheap mascara's utility is its capacity to make a sad face look totally deranged. Theater kids take note!) Leopards are too classy for all that maquillage. And they're too classy for polka dots: cheetahs have spots, but leopards have irregularly shaped clusters of spots called rosettes, which look like pointillism.

You can tell they're friends because they look like they can't stand each other. Cats!

Mom and I saw plenty of cheetahs on our sojourn in East Africa, often curled up in the shade under trees. That makes sense, because cheetahs are diurnal and leopards are nocturnal. So we never saw leopards until one day, afar and aloft:

We borrowed another tourist's spyglass and zoomed our DSLR camera as close as it could zoom, and this was the best pic we got. Notice the rosettes?

A CHANGE OF SPECIES

I decide to make my lioness into a cheetah, after all. I pull out my trusty fabric pens for the transformation. Plastic wrap protects my table. I start on the tail, where the dark stripes hide my mis-strokes as I get used to the pens. A cheetah's tail is more uniformly round than a lion's, so I make black fur to hide the leonine tuft! The face takes more finesse and finer-tipped pens. The rest of the body is just lots of spots!