Cover: Shrewfoot's Spite, Novella Four

COVER: YOU ARE HERE
ALLEGIANCES: link
CHAPTER ONE: link

Blurb:

Shrewpaw, daughter of Blackstar, can't wait to become the best warrior ever for ShadowClan. But when her training is unexpectedly delayed, she is forced to watch her rivals move forward, while she is left behind. When a cat she trusted above all others betrays her, her spite for all impure cats only grows, until it leads her down a dark path...

-~-

Well, this one was a bit of a late idea, but I plotted out most of it very quickly after a particular part of the idea came to me, and I realized it would make for a very good novella. I already explored Scorch's backstory, Breeze's was shown in canon, and Shade's was explained in the text. I figured it was fitting to tell the story of the other EOTW villain as well. ^^ I based part of this off of an idea Kate mentioned on her blog, so it's not entirely my idea, but I definitely tried to shape it into my own narrative. That'll make more sense as the book progresses.

Updates on this one might be a bit slow. I currently don't have a job, and so I'm spending my time packing up my apartment, applying to jobs, and writing a novel that I want to get published one day. Fan works aren't my top priority right now. But since I'd gotten a full, and long, chapter of my book finally finished, I figured I'd celebrate by starting another novella. My novel takes priority, but as long as I keep updating that regularly, I'll let myself write a bit of fanfic here and there in between the novel chapters. But like I said, novel comes first this time.

Anyway, luckily I'd written up an outline for each chapter a while back when I first came up with the idea, so I was able to write out the first chapter fairly quickly. I didn't want to post the cover and allegiances until the first chapter was done, but I also didn't want to wait too long to post the cover, as I'm fairly proud of how it turned out.

Well, you can see why I made Shrewfoot's new ref sheet yesterday. ^^ I'm really proud of how her new design looks, and I'm mostly proud of how she turned out here, though the shading still doesn't look quite right to me somehow. I feel like I've sort of hit a plateau in terms of improving my shading, even as my anatomy and general drawing skills have improved. Ah well, at least it looks better than my last cover.

I used her image from her ref sheet for this, though of course I took away the lineart and added shading. Like I said, not totally satisfied with the shading, mostly on the face, but I do like how it looks on the neck and cheeks, and the eyes. I tried something new with the fur texture. It's a touch lazy, but at least it doesn't have that wet paint look that some of my art has suffered from recently. I tried something from 's recent eye tutorial for the eyes, the last bit about the blue light on the eyes, and I tried to add more detail to them in general. I'm really happy with the end result.

I like how the colors look with the cover as well. It took forever for me to settle on a noun for the title, but I finally thought of "spite," which I think is really fitting for Shrewfoot's arc in the series, and her arc in this book. I really hope y'all will like the new story I've come up with, and can forgive the slow updates.