#warriorcat designs

[animatewarriorcats]

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:

[scootswarriorcats]

Partial heterochromia my beloved (So sorry for the repost, messed up the image)

[lesbian-bluestar]

BRISTLETHISTLE HERSELF. I love a girl. I kinda wanted to go for a kind of chilly look to her, I reckon she’d be pretty intimidating. Like I know that we know she’s just. Super earnest and manipulated by bramblenot but I think she probably scares the pants off most TC cats.

ALSO I COULDN’T DECIDE ON A DESIGN so she gets a winter and summer coat, gg. she is lionblaze’s granddaughter which means she’s lanky but fluffy. and she inherited whitewing’s fluff also. I wanted her to look like a wintery sunrise.

[redcatdesigns]

Everyone’s favorite grumpy blind bag, Jayfeather! Again a lot of self indulgant thoughts with his design/character(That you can ignore or use!);

Design Points;

He’s an average size for a cat of his age. He’s also very handsome, but he thwarts any romantic options.

When using magic, a large cat eye is seen above his head. 

His tail is patterned like a stylized feather.

If he tried, he would blend in so well with Riverclan’s cats.

Character Ideas;

Jayfeather's eyes are closed most of the time, he only opens his blind eyes when he thinks he's dreaming, when he's shocked, and to glare angrily at someone.

Jayfeather can hunt and fight pretty well, despite being a med cat. He got holly to teach him fighting and Lion to teach him hunting.

When Leafpool returned as a med cat he let her do a lot of stuff while he became more of a warrior, hunting and fighting, but still doing some med cat duties. Jay is Leafpool's favorite, but it's in a sort of pitying way, and she still calls him littlejay sometimes.

Jay really misses visiting other's dreams. Sometimes he'll find a clanmate and sit by them, asking them to describe their dreams, or daydreams, to him.

[animatewarriorcats]

Goosefeather! He is Bluestar's uncle and the doomed 'destined' medicine cat in thunderclan at the beginning of Bluestar's Prophecy. For a long time that was all we knew of him, and that he chased Crookedstar into the stepping stone that broke his jaw, before he got his own novella. With that short story though he presents an intresting premise of a cat with arguably more prophetic power than Jayfeather with no ability to change the course of history, forced to know every evil long before it comes to pass with no way to prevent it. This explanation both confirms and contradicts his 'future' behavior in Bluestar's prophecy in that his fatalistic nature makes way more sense, but his part played especially in Moonflower's death seems almost apathetic on re read. I don't know! he's an interesting character but I walk away from his narrative not knowing what readers are supposed to take from it besides everything is doomed and we have no free will haha. Fan assigned goracle (gay oracle) based on vibes

[animatewarriorcats]

Beavers! I had this one on file now for a couple years, and was waiting until I redid Dovewing's design to post it haha, whoops. I know the journey books are kind of annoying in warriorcats but the Beavers were an addition I found very interesting! A beaver damn can vastly change the landscape of a river system for miles downstream, so the premise is plausible at least, and it was an interesting way to demonstrate the magnitude of Dovewing's powers of perception to perceive things beyond the capabilities of a normal creature of any kind. I don't know where the beavers ended up going, hopefully they're doing well wherever they ended up setting up their new lodge.

Beavers are actually very docile most of the time. Being the largest North American rodent, they have the instincts of a prey species with not many predators that can easily take on a lodge and come away unscathed. Domestic cats in particular would have a pretty tough time defeating beavers, as adult beavers can easily head to head against Lynx and coyotes, sometimes even Cougars if numbers are on their side. They are most vulnerable in the first two years of their life, which will be spent entirely with their birth family lodge where the protection of numbers increases their chance of survival. In terms of size, They are born about the size of a two month old kitten, less than a pound but about a foot long nose to tail, and spend the first couple months inside the lodge where they can play both on dry land and the water inside a safe enclosure. They grow relatively quickly, by the time they are three months old they will weigh close to 4kg or 8 lbs, already a decent size to contend with a small cat, but still very much a baby. By their age of independence at about two, they can weigh upwards of 30 lbs or nearly 14 kg. Beavers also never reach a growth peak, and can become truly massive, upwards of 100lbs/45kg. The fact that the clan cats were able to move beavers with a patrol of 8 cats is a little bit extraordinary, but we will pretend that Lionblaze pulled some super strength and that's why they succeeded haha.

I have here some photos of beavers, on the left is a hunter with a large specimen to demonstrate how big they can get though I don't love or condone hunting haha. In the center I tried to show how different in size adults and offspring can be, and on the right are three different cats near beavers, all of which seem to be quite young, the top one I know for sure from the youtube channel was just a few months old at the time of this image.

[animatewarriorcats]

Eeltail! She is a Riverclan warrior in Mapleshade's Vengeance who was on the patrol with Splashfoot and Appledusk when they rescue Mapleshade and her drowned kits from the stormy river. She races downstream first, the moment she realizes Mapleshade's kit Patchkit was under the water, but is unable to rescue him. Other than that we don't know a whole lot about her! She seems nice.

[animatewarriorcats]

Moth Flight 2.0! I liked my initial design but it felt a little unfinished in the body, and when I looked up her wiki again apparently some of her most recent appearances in starclan have her listed as a 'greying white cat' so! I thought a 2.0 redesign was in order. For being the chosen first Medicine Cat of the clans I like her story, but still don't totally understand why she couldn't have just raised her kits and then gone back to being a healer. Especially since clan mothers really only care for their kits for the first six moons and after that they tend to be really hands off. If she had to she could have had another queen raise them and visited like leafpool just not in secret. I understand though that would have broken the narrative for the rest of the series I just think it didn't really make sense! that's all.