Hi, *nom’s your art style* any tips on designs? :D
hmmm... Something I do with my base game clangen designs is not colorpicking. Sure, you deviate from the sprite color-wise, but in my opinion it makes the design look like there was more thought put into it (this isn't the case for every single design in the world!)
I also tend to use the sprites as more of a suggestion or guide than, say, a rulebook that you have to follow. I'm going to use @rainclan-clangen as an example here. Pricklyjay is bengal in-game, but her simple design with rounded stripes also look pretty good! Mossyfern is marbled in-game, but at the time I didn't know how to draw marbled cats and so I drew her as a bengal instead.
When it comes to WyvernClan, my GeneMod clan, I do colorpick right from the sprites. This is because GeneMod has a ton more color variation and therefore even two similarly patterned and colored cats can still be their own distinct color.
I have a hunch that you weren't really asking about the colors, though, so I'll chat a bit about patterns here too. If you're making an OC that you won't draw super often, you can go crazy with your patterns and number of colors. HOWEVER, If you're making a comic or something similar to what I'm doing with WyvernClan, I recommend grabbing 2-5 colors and reusing some of them. My best example of this is on Cottonkit. Cotton(bless her heart)is a "seal golden marbled torbie point female with white gloves, kinked, short tail and albino sky blue eyes." Notice the white gloves part? On her sprite, you can just barely see them, but in her design it wouldn't make sense to add another color that looks almost exactly the same as one of her other colors, so I just use the white that she has on her body.
Whoops that kinda went back to colors. Anyway, I'm not a good person to ask this to because I really put less thought into my designs than it looks like. If you go take a look at @cccdiscord I'm prettyyyyy sure Coffee put a really good post about design there, and it's explained so much better than I ever could.
Tldr: Do what works for you, use a limited palette, and don't forget that you can always change something if you don't like it :)
OH and thank you for the compliment! It means a lot to me, really!
