Base Coats

What is a Base Coat?

Base coats come in 4 standard color categories: Nox, Soil, Sand, and Snow. How you can see which gene is present, is by looking at the beginning of the geno string to see which letters are capitalized. The first three pairs of letters collectively determine which base coat your stryx has. The three pairs of code letters for base coats are ee, aa, and ss.

Base Coat Colors

How Do I Know What Color I Have?

Within the three sets of code letters, there is one capital letter, and the rest are lowercase (ex: ee/aa/Ss). The capital letter tells you which of the three genes are present. When there’s just one capital letter in a pair (/Ss), that means that gene is recessive.

Base Coat Genetics

Dominant Genes

If there’s two consecutive capital letters in a set (ex: ee/aa/SS), then your stryx has a dominant base coat gene.

The example coat is a Snow coat, and no matter whether if it’s dominant or recessive, the worded Phenotype will still just say “Snow.”

Also, there are no dominant or recessive color differences in base coats. Dominant just means that the coat has a greater chance of passing onto offspring.

Genotype & Phenotype

2) Female – Common Gryph
Tail – Standard
Diurnal – Healthy
ee/Aa/ss/nSbl/nTp/nPn/nJ/nF
Tipped Jay Sable Soil Pangare with Flight

Below the code-letter Genotype (ee/Aa/ss/nSbl/nTp/nPn/nJ/nF), you can read the worded Phenotype (Tipped Jay Sable Soil Pangare with Flight) and see that this is a Soil stryx.

If you didn’t have the Pheno, though, then you’d read the Geno and see “ee/Aa/ss” code listed before the other code letters. The collective code “ee/Aa/ss” means that this stryx is Soil, for the only gene present is “Aa.” The rest of those letter sets afterwards are the individual markings that have been passed to the stryx baby.

Below are some practice rolls. Click the box to reveal the answer.

3) Male – Common Cara
Diurnal – Healthy
ee/Aa/Ss/

Sand

2) Male – Silken Lycan
Crepuscular – Healthy
ee/aa/Ss/nBld

Snow

3) Female – Common Harpia
Tail – Standard
Diurnal – Healthy
ee/Aa/ss/

Soil

2) Male – Common Harpia
Crepuscular – Healthy
ee/AA/ss/nU

Soil (dominant)

3) Male – Common Corva
Diurnal – Healthy
ee/Aa/SS/

Sand (dominant Snow gene)

Applying Base Coat Colors

Dracostryx provides base coat color sliders to help you pick your coat color. The base coat sliders are primarily used to determine your stryx’s color, but they can be used for other things like when applying natural colors to a marking.

There’s a couple different ways of how to use these sliders to get a base coat color:

As already mentioned, just use the eyedropper tool on a slider and pull a color like that.

Example: finding a Soil slider and grabbing a color directly from it, and that’s the color you’d use.

Combine two colors from different sliders within the base coat color category to create a coat color.

Example: Using 2 colors, each from a different Soil slider, and layering one on a lower opacity over the other to make a color.

Nuanced Gradients in the Base Coat

Very subtle gradients can appear in your base coat!

When we say subtle, we do mean subtle. Reasoning is, is so that your stryx doesn’t appear to have markings like Pangare, Scorch, Shade, Fade, etc. without those markings actually being present. The main idea behind the subtle gradient is to give stryx with low marking numbers a little something extra.
Be careful to not make your stryx appear to be any darker or lighter than the permitted color ranges.

How to Get Colors & Apply Nuances

Grab a color very close to the original base coat’s color.
Apply on design broadly, and make the colors gradient-blend together as smoothly as possible!

A general rule to go by:
if your base color gradient is immediately noticeable in the thumbnail, then your base colors likely aren’t subtle or smooth enough.

Notes

Base coat types are determined by the first three letter code pairs in a geno string.
Base coat color can be any color in their category– they do not have to be the parent’s colors.
You can combine base coat colors from the same category.
Subtle gradients are allowed to be present.
There are no dominant or recessive color differences in base coats.