For Herofest 2023 I made a limited edition linol print. Here is the carving of it.
I don’t even remember if I did linol at school at one time….
It was a lot of fun and I didn’t cut myself, although my fingers did hurt and it took several long sessions for the carving.
I made 15 prints and coloured each one individually with watercolour.
Black panther is not referring to a specific species of big cat, “black panther” but is really a term used to refer to dark jaguars (Panthera onca) and leopards (Panthera pardus).
There are rumors about black cougars but they are not known to exhibit melanism.
A black panther is the melanistic (very dark hair because of a higher amount of pigment) colour variant.
Black panthers of both species have excess black pigments, but their typical rosettes are also present. They have been documented mostly in tropical forests, with black leopards in Africa and Asia, and black jaguars in South America. Melanism is caused by a recessive allele (part of thw DNA) in the leopard, and by a dominant allele in the jaguar.
For black panthers, individuals displaying completely black coats are rare. They usually have a coat of black fur or large concentrations of black spots set against a dark background.
The appearance of a black coat may be influenced by other factors, such as the angle of light and the animal’s life stage. For example, some melanistic leopards and jaguars display totally black coats, because the finer details of their fur may be masked by diffuse light. In full sunlight, however, the faint spotted pattern of the coat may emerge.