November 21st, 2008
Photoshop and drawingtablet

So I finally drew one of my own original characters again, instead of somebody else's. I'm so proud of myself! It occurred to me that I haven't actually shown you guys a lot of my own characters yet. So far you've only seen the human SoL characters and Uncia, but there are actually a lot more OC's crawling around in my head. So I figured I really ought to show some of them.
So here's the first one - meet Featherfoot, the lesser gryphon. I made her up a few months ago, and decided to draw her when I stumbled upon ~KiyaraSabel's Gryphonic Descent Contest. Yes, it is another contest entry, but at least I'm entering an OC, so that's got to count for something, right?

Anyway, Featherfoot is a female lesser gryphon, a smaller sub-species of the regular gryphon. She's part snow leopard and part snow owl. A lesser gryphon is about the size of your average Golden Retriever and they're quite smart too. They're not social animals, but they do mate for life. Females are bigger than males and generally outlive them by roughly five to ten years. The average life expectancy of the lesser gryphon is forty to sixty years in the wild. It prefers to live in cold mountainous areas and obviously it's carnivorous. Like regular owls, lesser gryphons consume their prey completely - bones, fur, feathers and all. Unlike owls, lesser gryphons do not produce pellets. They have excellent eye sight and hearing, they can fly almost silently and are great jumpers too.
Their talons also work exactly like those of regular owls. When in rest, three toes will face forwards and one toe will face backwards. One of the forwards-facing toes has a flexible joint. When the animal is about to strike, this joint allows the toe to swivel backwards as depicted above.

Overall I'm quite happy with this picture, even though the wings did not come out the way I wanted. They were supposed to look more like real owl wings. These wings will never fly as silently as an owl's will, but I'll just ignore it for now. I do really like the way the background looks.