Lord_Syranus wrote:To any staff member: How do you guys come up with the designs of each litter every month? I have seen allot of wonderful designs and now im curious
I have a lot of tricks to help me get inspired, so have an essay :D
Most simple way is I see something that inspires me and I'll take elementals from it and make it my own. The Halloween deer have Wendigo elements (the long, human hair) and a little bit of the forest spirit princess mononoke, one outcome has a touched of evangelion just because the aesthetics are cool.
Sometimes I come up with a cool themes from nature, like last month's corn snake chameleons. I'll even redesign natural patterns into something original like my March cats which are based on tarantulas.
There are times I want to try out new techniques like September's watercolor butterfly wolves.
I'll often rely on a set palette like this month's deer. Lots of times the patterns are whatever looks good, often I try to keep the patterns somewhat uniform between outcomes by using similar shaped. Other times I have a deeper theme like my June dogs where they've got lacy black markings and pink flora accents. I have a trick for picking palettes and I'll often rely on these formulas when I need to come up with something.
A couple of times I've come up with a cool idea and I'll start it but it will fall through for whatever reason then I'll come back to it way later and repurpose it. The octopus lions from Halloween were originally made the underwater summer event, I had made the line art back then but never got a color palette/design I liked so I stuffed it into storage .
Occasionally I'll just come up with a cool idea and expand it into a litter or set. The sloth store pets were thought up like that, turning the monkey line art upside down or the Franken dogs from Halloween.
On the rare occasion I'll have a cool idea for how a litter will grow, my April dogs are a good example of this. All I knew about then going in was that I wanted 3 base colors, purple, orange and green, to grow up and mix together. I had no idea what the actual designs or colors would be I just grabbed the base color and experimented until I was happy. I ended having to change the green outcome from a deep forest to a teal and lime because it played better with the other colors.
The best way I get inspired is having very limited time to work. No joke, the pressure gets me to be experimental which leads me to make some interesting things, lol.
There are lots of times where I'll blend these tricks and I'll get stuff like my betta horses from October where I take inspiration from nature and I used a new scale technique.