Crookedstar 2.0! He is one of my top 5 all time warriorcats, and I'm grateful I was able to complete a project with him as a focus character. This is mostly just a color adjustment update, with more written information about key design elements. It can be hard to walk the line between light brown and pale ginger, so I adjusted his secondary and tertiary colors darker and less saturated to fully seat them in the brown and not ginger category. Additional construction and story notes under the cut.
I also went through some veterinary studies on common jaw breaks in cats and how to treat them, and learned some interesting (probably cursory) stuff! Apparently the symphysis joint where the right and left jaw meet in the middle doesn't fuse as strongly in cats as it does in dogs or people, and can become porous with poor health or age, as well as very commonly shears when cats break their jaws. Some of the images I reviewed just the symphysis joint was torn, and in others it was part of a larger compound fracture. in modern veterinary medicine pins can be used externally to stabilize fractured jaws, or if it's just an issue with the symphysis they can actually tie both bones back together with basically a sterile twist tie and the two sides stabilize each other. With that in mind, I outlined some thoughts about how one might possibly conceptualize Crookestar's broken jaw (this is not the only way, just what I came up with):
Also purely for my own entertainment I wanted to illustrate what it might look like to draw or animate Stormkit in the moments after his accident. I of course think any art is up to interpretation and this is just mine, but also! I'm morbidly curious about how Brambleberry in particular might have helped him recover from such an injury, taking inspiration from the little I know about veterinary jaw surgery haha and the limited resources she has to work with:
