For your requests: I’d love to see your take on Silverhawk and/or his mate Emberdawn!
I really like the headcanon that Silverhawk is Mothpelt's son, and his belief that leadership of SkyClan is a stolen birthright for his kin is what led him to try to overthrow the leader. This idea is explored very nicely in the fanfic Silverhawk's Legacy (which was written by mothdapple, actually! I didn't realize that until I was midway through drawing this. Thanks for the request!)
I made Silverhawk's family tree from my fic Silverhawk's Legacy! This was made using @basildusk 's super cool headshot bases. (I'm so grateful I didn't have to do the lineart of these cats myself.)
For those unfamiliar, my version of Silverhawk is the son of Mothpelt from the Code of the Clans story "Follow my Leader." This is the story about the establishment of the code that states that the deputy always succeeds the leader in leadership. This story also states that prior to that new code, it was tradition for a leader to appoint their kin as the leader after them. So in this tree, Mothpelt (and therefore Silverhawk) are distant descendants of Clear Sky.
Some ramblings on their designs below:
I updated both Silverhawk's and Emberdawn's designs. I had a brain-blast to make Silverhawk resemble a loggerhead shrike, so that is what he is designed after now. I definitely want to keep the shrike motif going forward, but I think his exact stripe pattern still needs work.
I am also much more pleased with this Emberdawn design than my last one. I think I've much better captured the balance between her striking, but also somewhat off-putting, gremlin energy. I wanted her to be mildly unsettling in appearance but also pretty enough that Silverhawk (the vainest cat in the Clan) eventually comes to find her very beautiful. I'm still not totally pleased with her colors though... I think it's the shade of brown that is throwing me off, but I couldn't get it quite right no matter what I tried.
Overall, the cats who designs I like the most I think are Mothpelt and Duskclaw. I feel like I absolutely killed it with Mothpelt's tabby pattern, I completely love how it turned out. And Duskclaw is just a very pretty lady, and I love drawing smokes :)
