Guild Wars 2 : The Artistic Origin of the Charr

The latest Guild Wars 2 post for Charr Week has been posted on the Arena.Net site. This time, the artistic origin of the Charr is explored in an article written by a trio of Arena.Net artists including Katy Hargrove, Kristen Perry, and Kekai Kotaki.
Q: Did you work from a text description of what the charr looked like, or did you just set out to design an aggressive, animalistic race?
Katy: The original text description for the charr didn’t describe their look much. It mainly described the charr attitude as a race and some of the things they might do in terms of play mechanics. We had a lot of artistic freedom when it came to designing the charr.
One of the ideas that helped sell the charr as a race was they wouldn’t just be dudes with cat heads. When talking about cat people as a concept, that is the mental image that met with the most resistance. I began talking about the charr in terms of being not dudes with cat heads but as chimera-like monsters that joined several animals together, with heavy feline features. I remember a key meeting when I drew a quick sketch of a bipedal cat beast to get the point across, we then began concepting to flesh out the race and really sell the idea – and a charr was born.