For Haymitch, a lot of my inspiration came from Hunger Games obviously. When Cinna was made and I was allowed to have his brother, I wanted it to be a Hunger Games name as well. I liked Haymitch from the movie a lot, so that was immediately my first thought. Then I delved deeper; Haymitch from the movie has a history of hitting back the bottle, quite a bit, so I used his yellow/gold markings as a way to represent his alcoholism, and my Hay is just as grumpy, if not more so, than the movie Haymitch. And even though both are grumpy alcoholics, they both have a soft spot for one or two certain people in their lives. For my Haymitch, that's his brother and his deceased mate, Diandra. So that's where Haymitch came from XD
Ele was basically a visual representation of what Diandra was, aside from her leopard markings. Dia's leopard markings were meant to be dark brown to blackish, but I pulled in the light blue markings from Haymitch to tie the two designs together, to show that she was their daughter. The same for Ly as well, I took Dia's faded base, and put in Hay's tiger marks and gold coloration.
As for Valkyrie, well.... I came up with her design first. Shewas meant to be slightly modeled after this really pretty cat that used to hang around my Nana's house, except instead of black/brown tabby splotches, I changed it to orange/yellow because I liked it better. The horns were just something I came up with, and her name and such were heavily based upon the song Valkyrie ( 1 and 2) by Lacuna. Her parents names also come from Valhalla. Her mother, Folkvangr, is the field that warriors have to cross. Her father Glasir, was named after the gianty golden tree to the entrance of Valhalla.
