#shelterasks

[shelter-clangen]

How would you draw the shelter cats as normal cats?

I don’t,, think? I’ve uploaded any art of my swap aus to my public tumblr, but I actually have a bunch of sketches for this already! Specifically for like,, an AU where shelter cats get turned into regular cats and magically appear in Aphidclan territory, so most of the shelter cast ends up joining Aphidclan lmao. These sketches are mostly on my Patreon, but here’s some snippets:

[shelter-clangen]

I was wondering, is there a specific reason that Dear doesn't speak? I'm pretty curious.

Also Kindred is my favorite.

Ooh convoluted symbolism reasons. Something about how the only woman in the cast doesn’t have a voice. Something about how Kindred volunteered himself to speak for her, but he can’t even do that right because he can’t read her mind and is projecting his own biases onto her all the time. Something about Dear’s crushing inner struggle with finding her own voice, and how even though she wishes she could, she’ll never fully be able to voice her dissent. Something about the inability to vocally say “no” when you wish you could. It’s a massively integral piece to her character, the only time she’ll ever “speak” in the whole series is that one page where she gets to scream one time in her own dreams. Not even in her dreams would she allow herself to have a voice. Something about how no one in the shelter would be considerate enough to give her disability accommodations and find a way for her to voice her thoughts without the need for a physical voice. It’s a backbone piece of her character for sure

[shelter-clangen]

Question, based on how you've set up the lore, is having kits completely disabled for all characters or are they about to discover some crazy shit

In-game?? I have kits enabled I think. Mainly so that I can get new cats in the clan to turn into characters. I don’t really use the game version of shelter as a guide for anything, it’s more just a place where I can harvest sprites with some character data attached to those sprites, that I can then heavily alter. There’s actually some characters in the cast in the future that I think in-game are kittens of Kindred or Dear or Husk or Withered (they’ve all had litters at this point, independently on their own) but I’ve altered them so heavily from that point that you probably wouldn’t be able to tell lol. So like in-game they’ve all had babies by now. Which is insane and weird to me. I could never imagine any of these freaks to be pregnant or looking down wistfully at a freshly born litter of infants lmao. Imagine Withered pregnant. That’s an image in your brain now. I hope you enjoy it LMAO

[shelter-clangen]

would dear touch purple

what purple made of .

[shelter-clangen]

I was gonna ask this on discord but I thought it’d be more fun here-

So we know that all the Shelter characters are based on clangen sprites and from the ones I recall they’ve all been some kind of greyscale.

What I’m essentially asking is, design wise, how would you handle a cat that had a lot of color in their design. Let’s say for example that Fireheart was generated into the save file. The characters are limited to like, black white grey and red SO! Would he just be an obnoxiously blood red character with white/grey eyes?

And let’s say there was a calico cat of some sort with very vibrant colors… how would they look as a Shelter character?

Oooh good question. Well, I’ve actually already made shelter designs for both Pearlstar and Blisswhistle who have lots of color in their regular designs:

So yeah, they’d be reduced to a black/white/gray/red color palette. If I were to draw that Pearl design today though I think I’d remove the gray paw markings and the rosettes on his tail, they’re far too complicated for a shelter design. The rosettes on his shoulders can stay for homage sake. Same for the hearts on bliss’s flank, they’re pure homage. If I wasn’t trying to identifiably referencd a pre-existing non-shelter design, I’d have wiped them from the redesign entirely, because they add nothing to the central theme, and if they’re not the absolute bare minimum that’s necessary, they can be simplified out of existence

At the moment the main rules/guidelines I’ve got for how shelter designs work are

1. Must be grayscale + red (red is optional, I don’t think I’d personally use it as the primary/dominant color for the character’s body, probably secondary at most)

2. Should be simple, I refuse to spend more than a minute coloring a shelter character

3. You gotta have some kind of body horror or visual creepiness/uncanny valley/disturbing/etc factor to their design

4. Needs to look not 100% like a cat, but NOT clearly and easily identifiable as any other animal, either. I wouldn’t just do cat + fish or cat + wolf, if it’s combined with anything, it needs to be in some kind of body horror way, like ram horns that look like rib bones, or weird elbow joints loosely based on a horse, or wearing a sheep’s skin grafted onto your pelt, etc. If they look like they don’t have any cat features or could never be identified as vaguely cat-like, it’s too far from the goal, and you gotta add back in cat features until it looks like a cat again

5. Preferably limited facial features, whenever I make a shelter character design with all their facial features (eyes/nose/mouth/pupils/etc) in tact, it looks strange to me lmao. It doesn’t feel shelter to me if the face is

6. Needs to have a distinct and unique silhouette that can be recognizable from a mile away and doesn’t just plainly follow the regular basic cat silhouette. This usually means that the body horror/design twist of them can’t just be markings, and very frequently is not markings at all or has nothing to do with their markings, but is something physical that is baked into their very silhouette itself, something you’d have to draw on the lineart phase. Preferably they still look identifiably unique, and unnerving to look at, if you drew them with no color at all. None of the substantial, distinct parts of the design should be lost if you remove all the color entirely

Shelter designs don’t necessarily need to have additional themes or symbolism added on, like they don’t have to be cat + something else at all. Kindred, withered, and even dear don’t really follow that design philosophy. But it is an option! Shelter cats can be “cat body but something about it has been warped, like they have a mouth on their chest” or “cat + something else” like Pearl’s unicorn imagery or husk’s elk/ungulate imagery. So if I were to design a calico cat, I’d probably wonder what about their spots might be important enough for me to utilize and exaggerate. Maybe their spots are giant worts or pimples, maybe their spots are flayed sections of raw muscle, maybe their spots are to emphasize fawn imagery so I’d maybe make everything else but the spots in that area flayed raw skin and give them some doe features, like doe ears and hooves. Maybe the spots are mouths with massive sharp teeth. Maybe the spots are pure shadow, filled with eyes. Maybe if they’re a tortie or calico with stripes in their spots, you could twist those into spiral shapes and create a design based around those uh… hypnosis amulets on a string (this would have to be incorporated into the design and warp the body in ways beyond just the markings, like you’d make their face the hypnosis’s amulet and make it a completely flat screen).

So it’s less about the colors and markings (because they’d all be wiped to grayscale and simplified to hell and back, they’re mostly optional) and more about what you can do with the calico spots that would make them important to include. Fireheart in shelter would 1000% not at all be a bright red cat with white/grey eyes imo, id probably take the “fire” part of his name and do something to work with it. But I wouldn’t make him just… walking fire, because that doesn’t suit the body horror centric design principle at all, that’s more fantasy. I’d see “Fire” and “Heart” and design him to be entirely covered in severe burn wounds, and bandages to cover his entire body, with just his anatomical heart sticking out, pulsing still on his chest. Perhaps bandages covering his eyes as a “justice is blind” reference to his personality?? But that also wouldn’t make a terribly distinct silhouette, so maybe I could do something with floating bandages breaking up his silhouette, or his posture, etc. Maybe ash keeps falling from the holes between the bandages, maybe chunks of him have been completely burned to piles of ash, so he’s dented in in places or missing entire limbs, and the trails of ash follow him wherever he goes. Something to kind of illicit the themes of a character that would look like a looming, malicious ghost that died in a tragic fire, and is still haunting the forest to this day, just barely held together before he completely shrivels up in the wind, nothing but a pile of ash and bandages.

Markings don’t really occur to me when creating shelter designs?? The colors and markings are usually pretty inconsequential to the everything else that determines their silhouette. A shelter design should still look the same if you removed all the color and drew them only as a lined sketch or smth. I don’t want to spend time worrying about coloring my characters. The markings should compliment the design, like Husk having sharp stripes for his sharp personality, or Withered’s stripes distinguishing him from a regular Sphinx cat, or the red in Dear’s eyes and teeth giving the impression of rot or injury or illness, but they should be necessary, inconsequential, incredibly minimal, and in comparison to your standard warrior cat fan oc design that relies 90% on its markings to be identifiably different from a crowd of other cats, pretty much optional and not required at all for recognition. Dont even think about the markings or the colors. They don’t even occur to the front of the mind. They are the final step in the design process. Start from the lineart and the silhouette

[shelter-clangen]

I pity dear… was that cat in the hat her mate? And did the baby die?

The hat fellow was not her mate, no. They were an acquaintance, if anything. Occasionally a friend, occasionally a hurtful nuisance. And there was no literal baby, because they can’t give birth in this world, so there was never any baby to die in the first place

[shelter-clangen]

What would Kindred be like if he was a father? I get the vibes that he would *seem* like a playful and fun dad, but the child would quickly learn (way too quickly for their age) that he can’t be relied upon for anything truly important. It’d probably only get worse as the child got older.

Oh yeah he’d be terrible. Dear would be a wonderful mother, they’d both raise the kid together, she’d be gentle and kind yet responsible and wise, make sure the kid was always on time and taken care of… but Kindred would throw a pretty big wrench in those plans. He’d be an irresponsible father, neglectful at times, reckless and destructive, because he wouldn’t really…care? For the kid? As a person? He would care for the kid whenever he found it to be fun and satisfying for his ego, but he wouldn’t really give a shit about how the kid feels, just what makes him look good and feel good to punch his weekly “good dad” card. He’s the kind of dad who would forget to drive his child home from school because he decided a trip to the casino would be more fun instead. And whenever he’s angry, he’d end up taking it out on the kid for the mildest of infractions. Which is where Dear’s flaws as a parent would shine through: Her making excuses for Kindred’s behavior and enabling him far too much by being a pushover. Her love for him would blind her, and she’d continuously try to defend his actions. Every now and then she would try to have a private talk with him to try to convince him to get his act together, and he would rarely listen or heed her advice. This would slowly build resentment between the two of them over the years, but Dear would struggle to ever voice her anger or concerns, and any fights that start between them wouldn’t go anywhere helpful. It’d end in Kindred accusing Dear of being unfair, how she’s just making up this horrible image of him that’s not true, and how hurtful she is for doing such a thing, while Dear can barely get a word in edgewise and was only being mildly firm with him at worst. She’d get completely trampled over and any of her arguments completely forgotten. So she’d usually end up fawning and apologizing for herself instead, and usually give up trying to confront him on his shit. Who knows if she’d ever get a divorce. Maybe in some distant future, she’d eventually grow sick of it enough to divorce him, long after their kids have already grown up and silently cut contact with their father, with a strained relationship with their mother. Maybe the kids cutting off their father would be the push Dear needed to really reconsider everything she’d dedicated her whole life to. He would be appalled and shocked by the divorce, he wouldn’t internalize or understand any of it and construe the whole thing to just be her painting him as some horrible monster with this false narrative, accuse her of being crazy, and he’d never learn a damn thing. He’d pick up a new partner pretty quick, while Dear maintains her relationship with her kids and is able to mend a bit of the damage after the divorce. She finds that she’s much happier as a single mom, and Kindred loses all contact with everyone and moves on with his life like they never even existed. He never fully understands why she divorced him, or why his kids cut contact with him. Sometimes it eats him up inside, but he never cares enough when it actually matters. He doesn’t understand why the people who were supposed to matter the most always refer to him as such a horrible person. His ego never lets him go far, he usually always has his excuses to cushion him and justify his own worldview enough to make them all sound crazy and hurtful and delusional. Dear would live a happier life with all their kids now grown up, and she’d never remarry. I think she’d enjoy being a grandmother, while Kindred never meets his grandchildren.

[shelter-clangen]

Are we meant to know who would have attacked Dear, or is it a mystery for now? The little thing kind of looks like the cat they ate a few moons back but I'm not sure if that's on purpose or if I'm misremembering. Either way this sequence is stunning and I love your work a lot! Please know I intend only inquiry and not criticism by any means 💚

Thank you! <3 At the moment you don’t know exactly who hurt Dear, no. There’s only implications. You won’t know exactly who for a long while. For now, I do love the speculation and seeing everyone’s different theories and ideas on who it could be! I’ve seen about 3 different theories for culprits now with yours being the third. But if you’re asking if it’s intentionally vague on purpose, then it is, for now at least