started this channel, and in fact actively disliked drawing for a lot of my childhood.

Despite that, for Youtube, I knew I would not only need to draw several cats to reference

in videos, but little graphics to represent topics I was covering as well as over 50 poses

for Sunnyfall herself. Then, four months into starting my channel, I also made the Trip

Through Time series which involved a full-blown illustration each time I discussed a book.

Suffice to say, even though I did not have much experience with art, I knew this job

choice would involve a lot of it, and the- over three years of drawing for this channel

and getting tips from my more-involved artist friends have taught me a lot. My style and

preferences have changed, the way I compose scenes, construct designs, and even the way

I functionally color using my drawing program have radically altered by now thanks to making

a small improvement every time I pick up a tablet pen, which, to be clear, is almost

exclusively for drawings you have seen on this channel. I still don't have a lot of

time for or interest in art outside of this work. But to prove that, really, *anyone*

can make improvement in this and at any speed they need to, I thought it would be a fun

exercise to redraw 3 of my first headshots along with my first Trip Through Time illustration

today.

Starting off we have the oldest of the bunch, Stoneteller, who was drawn for the Tribe Problem

video, the second ever on the channel, and far before I had decided how exactly I wanted

the headshots to look at all. Because of that you'll see me here sizing him up against

Hazeltail, the first cat I drew in the cell-shading style I adopted and the cat I now use as a

base to make sure the headshots all end up the same size and place on the canvas to make

their use in videos easier. In addition to the sizing, I would now draw cat's eyes

much larger than this, push their noses further down their face to be closer to the mouths,

and never ever let the filled in color include a break between the head fur and chest that

isn't actually part of the body. How did I miss that? I'll also be changing up Stoneteller's

design along the way because…I don't like it. I don't like how each of the accent

colors are only used once, I don't like how they very wildly not just in brightness

but in saturation, I don't like how dark the nose is when the muzzle below it is such

a light color, and I really don't like how none of the markings help to frame Stoneteller's

face or tell you who he is as a character. I've gotten slightly better about design

since then, so let's hope I can put a nicer spin on this one.

While I'm working on that, though, I wanted to do a little bit of discussion about the

channel at large, mostly just to take stock of all that's happened. This channel has

been a part of my life for almost 3 ½ years, and in that time I've amassed 113 videos

and completed a full 7-book rewrite series of my dreams in Paws of Stars. I also technically

have merch now, though it is not all that serious. If there's anything specific you'd

ever want to see on there, let me know and I can see if it's possible, considering

that type of request is the only reason the shop exists in the first place. With the channel

itself though, I have made some videos I'm really proud of. Gender in Warriors, the Paws

of Stars video, and Sunnyfall's Life would definitely rank among my top picks and-oh

wait have I said this before? I feel like I told someone recently…Oh! Haha… Yeah

she had asked for that. I should probably explain the story behind that one.

But first, let's return to the drawings. This time we have Dappled Pelt. She and the

next cat, Rippleclaw, were each drawn for the sixth Sunny Spiel's episode, say that

five times fast, on Riverclan and were drawn at a time where I had decided the size of

the canvas and position I wanted, but little else. Dappled Pelt's head is far too large

on this version to show any of her body, and Rippleclaw, as you will see, has very protruding

shoulders…more than any cat should have. I also had a strange belief at the time that

using any of the tools built into the drawing program for easier work would be cheating,

so even where it would be a benefit towards my specific aims, such as when oval tools

could help me form the iris or copy-pasting one side of the sketch to the other could

keep my cats symmetrical from the front, I opted not to use those techniques. I do actually

like Dappled Pelt's pelt design the most out of the ones I'm redrawing today…because

I seem to just always be a sucker for tortoiseshells, but, even for her, there are things about

the shape of the face I wish I could change, the nose tone is just pink instead of being

based in the skin and pelt color of the cat as I would do now, and many of the drawing

conventions in regards to facial proportions I mentioned with Stoneteller are still very

much present. So, in we go.

While I'm redrawing her, I think you all deserve an explanation regarding what the

heck happened last Monday. Well don't worry. There's no evil doppelganger, she's not

taking over me or my channel, actually she's not evil at all. Just a bit…well, odd. This

all started because, a long while back, I was discussing with some people in my discord

server where my name, Sunnyfall, comes from. I don't know what the twolegs would say

but clearly, for me, the suffix fall comes from our word for the season, leaf-fall. This

of course means that there are three other Sunny's, Sunnygreen for green-leaf, who

it made sense to put in Skyclan because of their focus on trees, Sunnynew for new-leaf

in Thunderclan because of their denser undergrowth and pension for progress, and Sunnybare for

leaf-bare in Windclan because of their lack of trees. Those three were eventually made

into Cloudysummer, Windyspring, and Snowywinter instead to coincide with the cats I made up

for Patreon, so you can just imagine these three living out their lives in those clans.

Of course, that left us with Shadowclan being empty, so a fifth cat, Sunnyvoid, was invented

to fill that…well, void. She's an odd entity, something of a living eclipse in the

form of a cat, and she can put up a glamour to look more normal when she feels like it,

which really isn't all that useful unless she needs to look like one of the Sunny's

considering she can't change her overall shape. Though I have heard that if you try

to pet her your hand will just disappear in the darkness, like a black hole or something.

She's fine though, just our funny little weirdo over in Shadowclan, and because she

can look like me, I asked her if she would make a video for the channel on April Fools

day and uh…well I think she might have spent an hour researching “what a youtuber is”

and came away with what is perhaps an incorrect idea of what I do here. It does explain why

she kept asking for all of those different top 10 lists though.

Anyway, back to the drawings. It was probably obvious in the Dappled Pelt drawing as well

but one of the most immediately obvious differences between my old and current styles is the shading.

I opted for soft airbrushed shading in this period and didn't have the knowledge or

patience of how to even select certain areas to put the airbrush in, which led to the shading

being messy, obscuring whatever colors I wanted the base to be, and actually making the shading

less noticeable. I also didn't shade in color, rather usually just using a darker

version of the main fur color of the cat, which aided in it not sticking out enough

as shading. Rippleclaw is also where you can see how not-streamlined my eye-drawing process

was at this point. I didn't use a lot of layers and didn't know what clipping masks

were or how to use them so my eyes bled together, the iris color popped out onto the fur around

it, and the shading and lighting for the eye either didn't reach the edge of the iris,

or bled out onto the white of the eye, often both in the same drawing. Design-wise, tabbies

always were, and, to an extent, still are the bane of my existence, but since I've

noticed that I've been actively trying to pin down what I want to do with tabby stripes

through more experimentation and research, and I hope to do a design for Rippleclaw that

will actually make me think of him when I look at him this time. Also…just putting

the dark color at the base of the ear was a horrible idea. What was I thinking?

As I work on that, I'll touch briefly on the future of the channel. Last Tuesday did

bring us the fifth book of A Starless Clan, Wind, so the next video you see should be

covering that book, in a couple of weeks once I've had time to record and edit it. After

that though, I have a pretty lengthy plan including all of the video ideas through the

end of June of 2025, so there's a lot of fun things coming. One thing coming up soon

is the first episode of the new series that many of you donated comments for, which I

am quite excited about. I had my Patrons participate extensively in this one and plan to continue

with that in future episodes of the series. There will also, of course, be more Trip Through

Time episodes, which always go in release order for the books so it will never be a

surprise what episode is coming next, and several more Sunny's Spiels on various characters,

topics, and some more fandom-directed ideas. It's all important stuff that I want to

think more deeply about for a while. Also in the schedule for this…over a year period

are some miscellaneous videos that will be trying out a few more experimental ideas on

my end. They almost certainly won't become series but I'm planning to include discussions

around this channel and video creation as a subject, a video from the perspective of

a certain canon character, and eventually, a look into my writing process through the

lens of a story I'm working on.

But before I talk about that, let's do one more jump back to the drawings, because this

is the big one. My drawing for the Into the Wild Trip Through Time episode was one of

the first times I had really tried to create a full illustration, and definitely the first

since I moved to my cell-shading style. Because I try to make all my videos ahead, I actually

finished up this drawing on February 20th of 2021, so, over three years ago, now. You

can see in the shading that I had only a cursory idea of where the shading should actually

go, and I only really shaded the main four characters. The background either had one

sweeping block of shading, like the faceless lineart-less background cats, more soft shading

like on the grass and bushes that bleeds into each other, or the precisely no shading on

the rocks. I color-coded my layers during this drawing but I hadn't learned about

layer folders yet which made me far more wary about including too many elements in the scene.

Well, that and the fact that this drawing took me even longer then than it does now.

When I draw a Trip Through Time scene now, I go back to the scene and find any little

details about which characters were there, what actions or expressions they each had,

what details were present in the environment, and so on so I can get as accurate a snapshot

of that scene as possible, which is one of the reasons that, for this re-illustrating,

I am adding in more characters that we know to have been there, which still isn't close

to all of Thunderclan but was more than I had given credit for. The other big thing

is that, like with Rippleclaw, I am completely redoing Longtail's tabby stripes for his

body, even though his were some of the better stripe patterns I did back then, and Lionheart's

design, which I had done entirely on the spot for the original, is being replaced with my

current and much more thought-out version of him. The shapes and colors on the original

were just too garish for my taste. I'm also avoiding using random brushes to represent

bushes and single thin strokes for grass since it stands out far too much from what I did

with the characters and rocks in the original, and there will also be no random faceless

cats watching this time. The way I draw cats in general has changed quite a bit, in ways

you can probably notice as I draw, and I'm more willing to make cats smaller and *really*

put them in the background as opposed to trying to keep them all roughly on the same plane,

since that helps draw the eye to what is important. The other big thing which I'll have to add

at the end is full-scene lighting which can also help to draw the eye in particular ways

and give the scene an overall mood that endless and different bright saturated colors certainly

did not.

And while I work on that, I'd like to give a very brief explanation on that story I'm

working on. During my writing of Paws of Stars, it was always my policy to keep as tight-lipped

about my current writing process and future plot or character beats as possible so that

you could have that first-read experience when you read it, including guessing at where

the plot would go and being pleasantly surprised by anything you enjoyed. Viewing a certain

piece of media after you have been spoiled on it shouldn't, and I hope in my case,

doesn't, ruin the experience. But I am someone who does value that first experience as much

as I value the second, and I like giving people the chance to have both. This was especially

true in Paws of Stars because it is intended to be a very canon-compliant fanfiction to

a story that most readers are already quite familiar with, so the deviations from that

template were ones I cared even more about keeping under wraps. This time though, I'm

more willing to let you in on some details, in time. Since I finished Paws of Stars six

months ago and had some time to get more of a handle on other aspects of my life for a

while, I had a desire to finally start up some writing again. This time though, I wanted

to focus on something that would allow me to practice worldbuilding and structuring

a plot, the areas I didn't have to worry about as much in Paws of Stars since the template

of the original Warriors arcs gave a big starting jump to that anyway. I used Paws of Stars

as a bit of training in how to write fiction at all, and I'd like to continue pushing

myself with aspects of writing I haven't practiced much before. Because of this, what

I'm writing now, or, more accurately, what I'm in the pre-production stages for now,