When Youre Designing A Cat With A More Complicated Non-solid Fur Pattern, Like Stripes Or Tortoiseshell,

When you’re designing a cat with a more complicated non-solid fur pattern, like stripes or tortoiseshell, how to you find the balance between making it look full with pattern while also being somewhat recreatable?

(Gonna answer both these in one post since they're kind of relevant to each other!)

I break the design down into specific patterns with a bit of randomness incorporated as well!

This is the rough base pattern for Redtail and Spottedleaf, as an example. The goal is to keep these specific spots consistent and let the rest of the patterns just be random splotches to get a complete look!

Trivia bit: Spottedleaf used to have FIVE COAT COLORS and it was absolutely exhausting balancing them all out, so I cut out all but three, like most of the rest of the cast (the only other exception being Crookedstar, with four). Having three coat colors for every character helps make them feel like they're all part of the same world, and forces me to keep the designs relatively simple.

Here's a little step by step!

1. I lay down the rough dark tones on top of the base flats. I use a textured brush on Paint Tool SAI to get the splotchy look. Actually, every single character in the comic gets colored with their dark tones first, as they usually lay underneath the light tones.

2. I throw the light tones on, using a seperate layer for now.

3. Details! Including Redtail's fox marking on his nose, which is just much easier to do if I do the light tones on a seperate layer, lock the layer, and paint in a simple triangle. I also color the eyes differently if a character is closer or farther away; for more distant characters, I just do four tones, two for the sclera (eye white) and two for the pupil and iris. Closer characters get a full proper three color gradient in their eyes.

I hope that helps!! ;v;

🫵🫵🫵🫵YOU WANT WARRIOR CAT REQUESTS FOR ART? OK HERE'S MY REQUEST.

Redtail. That's it. I just like Redtail. :(( Maybe with Sandkit idk up to you

Hi Blues!! Thanks for the request!!! Hope ya like it❤️

This was my first time drawing retail, and omg his coloration was so fun to figure out.

psst! hey! guess what! i make warriors name generators based on specific places!

-- central american (+ mexican) names -- florida names -- tundra names -- desert names (american & australian) -- new england, america names (made this one for my coastal fanclans, since they're based in maine) -- alaska names -- mesa biome names -- canadian names -- prairie names -- north carolinan swamp names -- u.s. desert names -- cave names (worldwide)

and here's a generator with all of the prefixes/suffixes i use regularly! -- moth's name gen

(go ahead and yell at me if you find something missing/something that shouldn't be there)

a prisoner worked for 136 hours to make a collective 17 bucks, all of which they donated to Palestine. and some of y'all can't even boycott starbucks.

if not already done, what's Ravenpaw's reaction to Tigerclaw being the new kittypet's mentor?

love your art btw!

Thank youuu! I don’t have the energy to finish this but the wips i had get the point across

Shortly after the sunningrocks battle, Ravenpaw requests to become a medic apprentice. He saw how Spottedleaf stood up for him and that Tigerclaw obeys her, it felt like his only hope for protection. Since Tigerclaw just lost his apprentice after fighting so bravely, Bluestar feels the need to reward him by giving him a new one as soon as possible- aka, Firepaw.

Fire and Raven are on good terms. Firepaw’s blind eagerness to impress and Tigerclaw’s rough, violent training often leave him in the medicine den with mild injuries, where Ravenpaw gets lots of medical practice caring for him. He’s intelligent, kind, and more welcoming than the other apprentices, and Firepaw appreciates it. Though he can’t help but wonder why he seems so jumpy around him…

Ravenpaw is terrified and guilty. He sees how much Fire looks up to his mentor but he’s too scared for his safety to say anything. The rest of the clan has grown a generally negative opinion of him, because how they see it, Ravenpaw experienced a single battle and then became this paranoid, jumpy mess. He looks cowardly, like he was running away from life as a warrior. Tigerclaw has threatened him and now his tarnished reputation makes him seem unreliable. No one truly understands his truama- except for Spottedleaf. She and Tigerclaw have a bit of history in this au (read here if interested!), so even if she doesn’t know what happened to Redtail, she knows that Tigerclaw is turning out like his own mentor and tries to keep a careful eye on his apprentices, hoping she can keep them on the right path. Spottedleaf can see how terrified Ravenpaw is of him, and even without an omen from Starclan, she accepted Ravenpaw as her apprentice to protect him.

hey. Thoughts on darkstripe and longtails’s relationship as mentor and apprentice? I think it TOTALLY should have been explored more, esp bc Longtails’ first apprentice dies so Badly…

I think it's pretty overlooked when it comes to art/animations/stories about it. I like to attribute one of the many problems in their dynamic towards the fact that the two were way too young for their rank

I like to think that DarkStripe was made a warrior a little earlier than normal, while LongTail was made an apprentice (and then warrior) as early as well. They were both gullible children who listened to their previous mentors about the law of the Clans and to uphold the most amount of loyalty and pride towards your home, even if it means talking down to those who don't share the same lifestyle as you.

The entire line of mentors and apprentices was one plagued by jingoism, blind loyalty, awarded violence and total acceptance of your community and of Starclan, no matter how bad it gets. From ThistleClaw, to TigerClaw, to DarkStripe, to LongTail. It was a neverending cycle of early societal development when they weren't ready yet.

And the things that LongTail learnt from DarkStripe carried over to SwiftPaw, blind loyalty, eagerness, pride, impulsivity to resort to hands-on action. It's what got SwiftPaw mauled to the point of being unrecognizable as a cat. Bits of him on the tree, covering the ground, a little bit over there in the bushes. I think when it all clicked to LongTail, his entire world just. Shattered.

He slowly bettered himself, he tried as best as he could, y'know. Watching DarkStripe - His mentor, his best friend- be exiled after feeding SorrelKit deathberries, it made his heart sink and his head ache, he mentally grasped out to DarkStripe like a kitten reaching out for a string. But the only time he was able to finally, after all of this time, reach out and finally get a grip on DarkStripe, he felt only cold flesh and blood-dampened fur, a gash over his throat from GreyStripe's killing blow. The roar of battle around him deafening any thought he had in that moment.