Shaded Secrets Artbook

ShadowClan Leadership!

Warning: this chapter contains spoilers for Hailpaw's medicine cat name. If you haven't yet read the first chapter of Silent Shadows, I advise doing so before viewing this chapter unless you happen to not care very much about spoilers.  

Leader:

Description: A courteous, conflicted leader who seems to bind the Clans together through well-meaning but slightly desperate pleas for peace, Willowstar has cautiously avoided the pitfalls of his predecessors that ended in their gruesome deaths. This balancing act doesn't come without its challenges, though, as ShadowClan's volatile political climate is ever shifting and evolving. Despite this, Willowstar has managed to stay grounded throughout his unusually lengthy and peaceful [for a ShadowClan leader, anyway] reign, and is always content to take a respite from his duties and bask in the sun.

Design Details: Like many other cats named after plants, Willowstar is often drawn with willow leaves either behind his ear or strewn throughout his fur. Having darker legs is a prominent trait among ShadowClan cats, so Willowstar displays this trait in his darker brown legs. Unlike a lot of ShadowClan cats, though, Willowstar is long-furred and this fur is quite fluffy, preventing him from moving through the shadows with as much ease as the average warrior, but he seems to work around it when it arises as an issue. 

Deputy:

Description: ShadowClan's stern and reticent deputy, Slightclaw values maintaining organization and order, whether or not others agree. He is often frustrated by his leader's indecisiveness and insistence on pleasing the crowd, even at the cost of personal values. Though he appears to be the leader ShadowClan needs, this cat of few words seems to harbor other priorities..

Design Details: Slightclaw has gone through several design revisions over the eleven or so months he's existed definitively as a character, particularly in the patterns on his face, but the elements that have been retained are his contrasting color palette, indifferent resting expression, and the darker color covering his legs that has become a rather common trait among ShadowClan cats.

Medicine Cat:

Description: ShadowClan's apprehensive, curious young medicine cat, Hailwatcher, fills the role of protagonist for the first book. While he is still recovering from the unfortunate death of his mentor at the time the first chapter occurs, he's a skilled healer in his own right, having absorbed and retained an impressive amount of medical knowledge in the few short moons he  received training. Though he doesn't know everything there is to learn, he's always willing to keep an open mind and perhaps pass on some of his insights to another. 

Design Details: Hailwatcher's design has received, many, many alterations over the time he's been a character- at an early phase he had a third, darker gray in his color palette but it was removed to make the design more simple, and the size and position of his white splotches has been tweaked many times though the one over his left eye has always been there. He also wears a bundle of herbs behind his ear like most other medicine cats; his contains thyme, juniper, ivy leaves, and marigold. 

Mediator [more accurately, the lack thereof] Footnote: Although the role of mediator is well established in my version of Warriors [serving as a communal therapist of sorts and working closely with the medicine cats to stabilize everyone's emotional and mental health] and not just a one-off role, ShadowClan, finding the concept of mediators to be stupid, does not have one. Do they need one? Yes, badly, but since they're stubborn, they don't have one [the only Clan that does at the beginning of the series is actually RiverClan] and the one guy who actually wanted to be a mediator was strong-armed into becoming a warrior like everyone else. Great.