Birthday Soon

Lol I forgot to post this here. This is Mako, an old-ish OC of mine.

I'm trying to go through some of my old OCs and draw refs for them, and so far, this is the only one I've completed.

Mako originated in 2020 as a demo sona design. I never used her, but I liked her design enough for the concept to stick in my brain for the following three years. I did some redesign concepts for her last year and then promptly forgot about them until a couple of days ago when I noticed she was missing from my Toyhouse page. I decided to give her a ref, and here we are.

Her name comes from the Mako shark, but the shark aspects of her design are based on blacktip reef sharks and tiger sharks. The main inspo for this iteration of her design was how her old design looked a little like a sunset, or like musk sticks (if you don't know what musk sticks are, they're a pink Australian lolly. Look it up). Based on the sunset idea, I turned her into a surfer girl. Lol.

Back at it again with my ClanGen game! You might remember me talking about ClanGen. You may naturally assume I've picked it up again recently and decided to draw my clan's ten founders, and that I spent a few days to a week making this. And you would, naturally, be wrong. I started this in February. I drew the first eight cats. All that was left was Morningpaw and Creekpaw. But I just. Stopped. And forgot about it. Until a month or so ago, when I FINALLY drew the last two cats. And then I forgot about it again until a week or two ago, when I finished it up, and I'm now posting it.

These cats are from HeronClan, a fanmade Warriors Clan that lives by the sea. They are the Clan's founders. You might have noticed the 2:3 adult to child ratio, which was an accident, and resulted in Rowanstar getting four apprentices: Wolfpaw, Webpaw, Morningpaw and Creekpaw. I can only imagine what that must have been like. Mouselarch was the only warrior at the beginning, too. I'm now in the 30-somethingth moon, and the Clan has wayyy more members now; I'm thinking of drawing another list of cats once I get to Moon 50, but we'll have to see.

Here are the traits/skills of each cat, so you can get a bit of a feel for their personalities:

Rowanstar: calm, unusually strong fighter

Toadheart: careful, great teacher

Skystripe: faithful, great hunter (pain)

Mouselarch: strange, good teacher

Wolfpaw: patient

Ganderpaw: ambitious

Hillpaw: ambitious

Webpaw: loyal

Morningpaw: compassionate

Creekpaw: cold

I started this game before the experience system changed, so that's why the apprentices don't have skills yet.

Anyway, I've been procrastinating on this thing for long enough, so here it is! Enjoy.

✨reblog if you're accepting anonymous asks about anything✨

Mother's Lair

OMG

THE CURTAINS FLEW, AND THEN HE APPEARED

KITTY ON THE BALL!! This is awesome by the way!!

I drew @aposterous character Carnical! I love the silly robotic clown kitty :3

This is apart of an art trade I’m doing with them! I enjoyed drawing their little goober

Anyways, circus cat cause gave off clown vibes lol

Did a silly

I saw that Flix might be getting redesigned and decided to do my rendition of what I'd want in a redesign! More under the cut ✦

Traits list (some are on the ref but I'll expand on them here):

I changed the palette quite a bit. I like the original black and gold, but it didn't give me space vibes, so I wanted the highlights to vary more in hue. That might be a controversial move, but I like it.

Keeping with the colour change, the blood and fire breath would probably be pink here.

The eyes are on the side of the head. This is inspired by seagulls, and sort of by their herbivory, although I would make Flix an omnivore (if not a carnivore) if I could. There aren't enough omnivores in CoS and I think it would be a better fit for Flix than herbivory.

They walk on their wings and feet like a pterosaur, just because it looks cool. Plus it makes them look a bit less like a different font of bird.

Their wings look more bat-like here. Ideally, they wouldn't; I'm just not good at replicating the canon wings. I wanted to emulate comet moth wings (because comet, like space) but I don't think I pulled it off. I could settle for feathered wings in a Flix redesign, but I have beef with feathered wings in spec evo because they're so unlikely to occur since they're such a derived structure. But CoS is already so unbelievably unrealistic that it's not even spec evo anymore, so whatever lol

The hindlegs are syndactyl, so they can perch! Their toes are also webbed, so they can actually swim! And maybe paddle around on the surface like ducks (wait that's cute... I might animate that).

They have claws on their wings. These would help with perching and perhaps climbing (like if they needed to climb a cliff instead of flying or something; maybe for stealth.

The back wings are attached to the hindleg. That's the case in the canon design too, but I bring it up here for clarity and also to add that I (and I assume the original designer) based this on microraptor's hind-wings. Microraptor beloved <333

I couldn't add them here as they'd obscure stuff even more, but I think there would be a couple more comet-shaped shards down the back. They would be floating particles, like the orbs that they keep adding to new creatures.

I gave them little star spots to make the black areas look like a night sky!

You can't see it due to the hind wings covering it, but the tail has the same gradient as the little danglies on the wings.

I just realised this version makes them look a bit like the Flickaflie, which people seem to already mix up with this guy anyway, so uh, oops. I think they're different enough.

If you have any thoughts to add to this, leave a comment! I'd love to discuss and I'm fine with criticism of this design. I might make a second rendition if I become unsatisfied enough with this. :3

I'm a bit worried about the CoS redesign polls...

They're going to be redesigning two of my favourite creatures (Flixlit and Nymphasuchus), as well as some others, and at least one of the poll options for each would make me hate them

Like I would cry for ages if they made Nymphasuchus a tank because I love how it looks like a crocodile-ferret. Nymph is perfect, he doesn't need a redesign :( I hope that when they do redesign it, they keep its cute toes. I love Nymph

And Flixlit is my main (by far; it's my favourite creature in the whole game) so any redesign that changes it would be a loss in my book. Thankfully the poll currently looks like this

So I doubt it will change much in the redesign. I just don't want the other options because spiky Flixlit would look dumb tbh

Still, I'm slightly worried bc sometimes the redesigns suck. I despise the Pero redesign SO much. They made a fine creature so ugly. They made my sweetie look like a demon. And everyone was mad about Kendyll's bad initial redesign (tbh I didn't mind that one and I actually think the new redesign looks out of place compared to the other creatures) so yeah.

I know this isn't remotely what I normally post, but I need to ramble about this because I'm anxious now. Here's hoping they don't mess up with the Flix & Nymph redesigns.

hi! i was wondering what kind of problems you’re talking about in your last post about the warriors books? i stopped reading after the Great Battle and honestly i haven’t picked up a warriors book since middle school, but im trying to get back into the fandom and would love to hear what you have to say!

there are kind of a lot, some more rampant than others. you've actually read further than I have (I stopped at sunrise), but I know a bit about the books after it because I frequent the analysis side of the Warriors fandom and I don't listen to spoiler warnings. The most common issue in the books is how not much happens in them. power of three and omen of the stars easily could have been one arc, but because the authors didn't plan the books properly they ended up as two.

some other things have been pointed out more recently. the series doesn't give disabled cats all that much respect (consider Snowkit's death, for example, or how Jayfeather was pressured by Leafpool to become a medicine cat because he was blind).

a few years ago, spottedleaf got her own novella which contained some very problematic aspects that I don't want to get into here.

there's also a lot of implicit sexism in the books; she-cats get fewer lines (i.e. less focus) and usually settle down and have kits no matter how little it seems to fit their characterisation. it's especially bad in dawn of the clans IMO; I haven't read it since 2020 but I'm pretty sure gray wing has like three girlfriends in two books? I never finished dotc but I've heard the sexism continues all the way through it.

the tribe of rushing water is also in a bit of a weird spot. i think some people claim cultural appropriation, but I don't know enough about that to verify it.

that's all that comes to mind at the moment, but I'm sure there's more. and i also haven't read any of the books in almost four years, so i might misremember things or misrepresent points originally made by people who actually did read the books properly.

Edit: @smewduck reminded me of the WC racism doc, which is as far as I can remember where I heard about the Tribe thing. here's the link to the doc in case people haven't read it, but just know it's really long: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nnCCD4TfR-5MZie9hQgpDfEE4mYpCtjNXQpD9VqOkxs/edit

WIP for a new Cosi ref!!!

I really need to post more... trying to get over my aversion to posting WIPs. A full description will come when the ref is done!