The Royal Analostan: The feline side of character design

I was given the task to design the main cat characters for The Royal Analostan animated film. While I am used to designing human characters animals as characters was something new to me. Both in terms of character design the same principals apply. However with animal character design depending on what style you are going for a degree of anthropomorphosis is needed because humans relate better to human or human-like creatures. How you go about that anthropomorphosis can be easier or more difficult depending on how stylised your film is going to be. Here are various forms of the main character with differing levels of stylisation.

The director wanted a more realistic look for the cats. So in order to sell the cat characters better I realised I needed to brush up on my cat anatomy. Here are some of my studies:

While most creatures have similar bones and muscles (yes cats have pecs and biceps too) each creature has its own set of proportions. During the designing of the cat characters I had a few ups and downs with cat anatomy as you may be able to see in the pictures in this post.

On the rendering side of things I had to figure out a good way to draw fur and how it reacts with light (though I'm not sure if this was necessary as real fur is not going to be used on the final models as far as I know)