A short process of my development of my kitties from beginning to now during the past couple weeks! Plus some side-pictures of my thought process to the side; initially they were inspired by Displacer Beasts, which I've always really liked and found really cute, and originally the first version had winged forelegs instead of being six-legged.
Unfortunately, though, after I'd just gotten really attached to this incarnation of them, I remembered that they almost exactly remembered "cloudcats", a species of flying cat from a novel I read yeeaaarrrsss ago. And they ended up being basically the same except for the colour(black) and the tentacles.
(The images I included here belong to Rhynn from deviantart, whose gallery is here: http://rhynn.deviantart.com/ They're a fantastic artist an dyou should totally check them out!)
After that, I tried a somewhat more dinosaurian approach because we'd been watching Dinosaur Revolution and I really liked what I learned from it about how dinosaurs used to lay at rest.
I ended up modifying it to be a bit more feline in the end, with them preferring to walk on all fours, but they still have the big butts with powerful muscle for leaping, liftoff, and they are capable of walking or running on just their hindlegs for extended periods of time. They also have wings separate from their forelimbs, though they're neither feathered or fully membranous with fingers. They're sort of in-between, but that's all for tonight!