every warriors cat in order of appearance

general warriors blog @bowiestarzzz

i am designing characters in order of appearance. I am only doing characters that are named and appear in text. one day maybe i'll go back and draw everyone else, we'll see

designs are free to use with credit, but i am not designing them with animators in mind, just a heads up

Thank you so much! I know it’s a really boring answer but lots of practice and looking at refs. If you go back and look at my first designs, they’re quite rough. But I draw almost every single day and after doing that for several years, there’s been great tangible improvement I think!

I think also looking at other people’s designs and really studying them helps. There are design moves that I use very often and are just second nature to me, so studying what the masters do can also be very helpful. I study @warriorsproject a Ton to try and understand how to make clean, efficient, but still very creative and interesting designs. Also just trying to push yourself outside of your comfort zone and try different color combos etc can help!

It can sometimes be hard to make a unique design for popular characters since they’ve been drawn so many times, but tbh just really try to get down your first draft by just drawing them the way you see them, even if it looks a lot like other designs. There’s no problem with different people’s designs being similar—in fact sometimes people try too hard to make their design unique and it just becomes completely unrecognizable as the character it’s supposed to be—so I tend to favor recognizability over uniqueness. But giving a design a few passes, adding aspects or taking them away, just experimenting really helps. Also looking at other characters with a similar description (say, Shadowstar and Holly, both black cats with green eyes) and honing in on physical or personality traits that differentiate them helps. Holly has spiky fur, so exaggerate that, especially since she has a bit of a temper, it goes well with her character. Meanwhile Shadowstar is reserved, a noble leader, and from the mountains— so maybe she’s longer-furred, more calmer, sleeker.

ty! i use a custom brush on krita. the setting screenshots are under the cut