cowscratch:

After this weeks’ comic, I realized that I had never sat down and plotted out all of Cadistra’s druid forms. So, here you go! Pardon my messy animator sketching. 

A few notes:

  • I tried to keep a few veins of Cadi’s physical characteristics throughout – namely her short, stubby horns, her white fur markings, her expressive eyes, and her fringe/bangs/whatever you want to call them. 
  • Cadistra isn’t very big as far as female tauren go; she’s on the smaller side of average, and more pear-shaped, so I try to make her forms a bit bottom-heavy and just smaller/shorter overall. I’ll revisit these one day and make that more obvious.
  • Epic flight – While drawing these, I kept thinking back to how “practical” or doable it is to shapeshift and create random bangles and jewelry. The real tauren epic flight form is adorned with bangles, beads, and leatherwork. It’s beautiful, and I love it, but I think Cadistra wouldn’t put too much stock in it, so I have her less dressed up. The only thing I kept was that odd collar/cuff thing, which translated nicely to her stag form.
  • Stag form – When I studied the tauren stag form, I noticed a few things – namely a) sheer size, and b) it has hooves, like a goat or a horse – it’s not a cloven hoof, like an actual deer or a pig or something. That bothered me more than it should have, so I think that I’ll go back and change that. Also, again, Cadi is a smaller tauren, and her horns are quite small and stubby, so I gave her smaller antlers and made her smaller overall.
  •  Aquatic form – this bugged me! I actually ranted to a coworker about this – the aquatic form should not have ears! Ears are useless underwater! Yes, they look cool. Yes, they signify that yes that is the night elf model and they never bothered changing it thank-you-very-much. BUT – /science nerd hat – ears in marine mammals are functionally useless. They detract from the aquadynamics of the animals’ form, they’re huge so they’re perfect for prey to snap at, and they’d just fill up, pop, and get infected. I’m not 100% how balance and swim bladders work in marine mammals, but I’m sure it would screw that up too. 
  • That being said, ears are really used for two things – one, hearing, and two, cooling off. (Blood circulates to the thinner, wider surface area of a large ear, like on an elephant or a desert hare, gets cooled off being so close to the skin, then gets recirculated back into the body.) You don’t need huge ears underwater! So while it’s a little less aesthetically pleasing to take them off, I made it a point to remove them on her version.

Blah blah blah Cadi stop talking about druid forms and the science behind them
Remember we’re in a world of talking shapeshifting cow people to name a few things

EDIT: I forgot how Tumblr can be a turd when it comes to single long images, so I split it up. :B