Voyageclan

Second prompt from clangen complete! These two were the only prompts I kept from moon zero! So we’re ready to go to moon one right??? Nope sorry! So I jumped right into the prompts because I wanted to see if I could do this, pushing through completing comic pages are something I historically give up on, but the prompt nature of clangen really helped. However, that made me completely skip exposition. So my next mission is to make a prologue to introduce the characters, setting, and situation! Then I want to round off moon zero with a few more prerequisite scenes so that Moon One is the first moon with Voyageclan formed as Voyageclan!

Checkov’s fox yaknow

So! From what I remember about the original prompt from clangen (I was not taking great notes at this time) I antagonized an intruder and he got hit by a car running away. There are no cars in this setting so I went for the closest thing to create that sudden death, which was the fox from the other scene. My take on Moreldapple winning vs the fox being bold enough to go for this cat is that this fox is very reluctant to be outnumbered. When Morel’s party backs her up, the fox runs off into the jungle but picks off this cat that it sees is actively being attacked by the other cats.

I did go back and edit the last page with the fox so that it’s heading towards the jungle instead of into the ambiguous blue void lol

RAAAAAH!!! I’m finally finished with this page!!! And almost done with moon zero!! I swear the day after I posted the last page I went into a flow state lining, but I could not get locked back in for coloring to save my life.

So if you look up a cat years/human years chart, most look something a bit like this:

3 month old cat = 4 year old human

6 month old cat = 10 year old human

9 month old cat = 12 year old human

12 month old cat = 15 year old human

18 month old cat clan that= 21 year old human

2 year old cat = 24 year old human

This is useful for real life but not so much for warrior cats 😅 My biggest issue is that a new apprentice should not be comparable to a 10 year old child, they’re getting trained for war and might DIE but they should be in elementary school at that age! Brokenstar was literally a villain for having child soldiers, but the standard age isn’t great as is. Then at 1 year, the cat would be compared to a 15 year old? That’s a full warrior or med cat being younger than a high school graduate! So I started to think about how I wanted to portray cat ages in my comic and I came up with a new metric based more around life stages.

1 month=toddler (2 year old)

2 month= kindergartener (5 year old)

3 month = early elementary school (8 year old)

4 month= late elementary school (10 year old)

5 month = 6th grade (preteen)

6 month (apprenticeship starts) = 7th grade

7 month = 8th grade

8 month = HS freshman

9 month = HS sophomore

10 month = HS junior

11 month = HS senior

12 month = graduate (young adult)

This makes apprentices and warriors a bit more mature than real life cat age charts would. Young teens seems like a better age to be training for battle than CHILD. Plus this time scale puts recently graduated warriors at the same age as recently graduated students! I kinda wish that apprenticeships lasted longer, more like 15 moons or so, to cover some young adult years but alas. The only thing I don’t like is the rapid growth into slower growth. Anyone have any thoughts on my cat to human age scale?

And then of course I had to practice some designs to see how I would draw cats at various ages. When I initially did my cat designs, I wasn’t thinking too hard about it but now I realize I have cats that are about to start growing up moon by moon. To practice, I went with my favorite girl, Moreldapple! Since she’s old at the start of the comic, it would be the most spoiler-free character to pick.

How did I do? Any thoughts on my cat age charts? Since the comic goes month by month this will be important as kits grow up so I want to make sure I like it!

A new scene, a new setting, and MORE CATS. This scene comes from a border patrol prompt, but I didn’t feel it fit to call it border patrol before the cats know any borders.

I feel like this is going to be the point where I really start trusting the process in my pages. I dreaded coloring because I knew I needed to convey a jungle scene. Honestly, I am so much happier than the beach scene! I had no idea what to do in such an empty space and I think it shows. But here, I was able to just turn off my brain and work on my setting and incorporate the cats so much easier. I’m slowly learning that backgrounds aren’t evil and that they are cool actually, last year I did a few full background pieces on my TikTok for speed paints and those really helped me out here!