WIP's or UFO's? Plan of action required!

So I've pulled my 3 WIP's off the shelf from where they were fast becoming UFO's, for a reappraisal of the situation.
Each one has an issue on it that I need to sort out, so as to be able to continue.

First up, my beloved dogs.

This is the original photo of them.

I noticed with the staffy, she was coming up brighter than in real life, but not enough to bother me. However when I started the tan markings on the cavalier, it really was too bright! It was VERY red!

The colour was just totally wrong. After alot of fiddling about I managed to match up the colours to her by 'eye', just looking at her and seeing if it looked the same. I was really pleased with how it turned out.

Now though, that I'm as far as her muzzle, the problems are more difficult because I can't immediately tell if the 'grape' shade for instance, is part of her black fur or a 'too red' colour of the muzzle. It is hard, because this pattern has alot of confetti to make up the colours, The black isn't just black, it has lots of shades in it. I'm really getting stuck. So that's why this got shelved.  Can't stand to just not do it though.

Plan of action: So to get myself going on this again, my plan is to continue as much as I can with the black area's of her face where I CAN tell what I'm doing and then go back and with the aid of the original photo, try to decide which of the colours left are part of her face and which goes in with the black.

Next project, the Big Cats one.

I swapped my needle holder with a girl on the forum for this kit, which turns out to be chinese. I didn't mind though, I loved the picture and just thought as long as I can follow the chart, that's fine.
What I  hadn't realised is that it's obviously a copy of an original design! I stupidly had thought it was just that it was sold cheaper in other countries, such as being able to get DMC cheaper in the U.S than the U.K

Anyhow, as I was going along with it, I came to realise it just didn't have the detail it should and would never look right to me.

This was supposed to be the lions face, and although you can see the shape appearing, I don't think the colours were ever going to look right!

Plan of action:  Another lady on the forum had done this chart previously and she sent me her orignal for this design. So I need to cut my losses and restart the whole thing and work again from that. The Chinese version has about 32 colours (I can't remember exactly now) and the real version about 75, so I expect to see quite a bit of difference in the details.

Snow Leopard.

A lady on our forum did this design from HAED and I fell in love with it. I'm not really taken with the style of their designs generally, but I loved this.
It's designed to be done on 25ct but I had the 'good' idea of working it on 32ct, 1 over 1 and I hated it!
I wanted to try out gridding for the first time and the pens bled with the count being so small, and I found it hard to follow the grids.  Also the coverage wasn't right.

Plan of action: One action has already been taken, of binning it! So I can't show how it looked, but my plan now is to choose another count to work on and just restart again. So I'm looking at the options right now and trying to choose.

Hopefully these will be getting restarted soon and I will see some progress on them.
:)