Month: April 2016

Last Flight is a great novel and you should all read it if you can. 

Caronel, Valya, and Reimas, Grey Warden Griffon Crew. 

I’d like to give a special shoutout to Reimas, who has not yet been Joined and is just painting over all her Templar stuff with Warden colors. What a good. 

I’m painting grumpy elves who only show up in the DA Novels. 

The impression I get out of Honey-Curls-Blue-Eyes-With-Gold-Flecks Caronel from Last Flight is that he is bishie as fuck. Who allowed this Tolkien elf into my Dragon Age. This is an outrage. Look at this asshole he’s a mage in heavy plate. Who is this guy. 

Karl was never made Tranquil and he and Anders got gay apostate married and ran away to the Anderfels to raise griffons in the mountains and shut up everything is FINE

this is easily one of the top five most self-indulgent things I have ever drawn

I love how you draw griffons! Now, I just need to know, how do you draw them? Would you ever consider making a tutorial on how you draw them?

Thank you! I love drawing griffs. I, uh, I can try to do a tutorial? Or at least show you how I draw griffons. 

image

Mostly I’ll lay out my griffons like this (and I think it shows their underlying structure pretty okay?). I do a line of motion, which is a skull/spine/tail swoosh that more-or-less describes the position of the head and neck, the deepest point of the ribcage, and the highest point of the hips (from the side). Major anatomy (circles!) is sketched in on top – shoulders are one ellipsoid, hips are another, legs are triangles hooked onto those. Wings and ears/beaks/fluff/body language bits are usually last. 

I tend to draw them with almost horsey proportions and really long legs because… I do, I guess. Also, birds have really long legs, which they (and I) then obscure with loads of fluff. 

image

(fig. 2: samples of excessive floofiness with underlying anatomy)

If you’re drawing Dragon Age griffs, they should be about 12 feet long, which I tend to assume is from beak-tip to rump, and excludes the tail. That should put human head-high at about a full-grown griffon’s shoulder – Last Flight implies that riding really massive horses is standard training for riding a griffon, so I’m assuming they’re similar sizes. 

image

You can build a bunch of poses really quick like this!

The hardest part about drawing griffons is wings! Here is a quick thing on how wings work. Also, go look at a lot of pictures of birds. Googling the phrase ‘bird wing diagram’ will also not lead you astray. 

image

Finally, here is a video of how I do a sketch with a griffon! In this case, Bethany and her birb doing acrobatics to fuck with Hawke (doodle sped up x4 for your viewing pleasure, I don’t actually draw at the speed of fucking sound)

Hey, y’all dig griffons? Or maybe coloring? Griffons and coloring? 

Because I’m a Huge Dweeb™ and I keep making unique griffons for people, I thought I’d share my Griffon Template if anyone else wants to color some griffons. You can get the .psd file here or the .png transparent lineart here!

The .psd file should be pretty easy to use. Color on the layer labelled ‘color here!’. You can also add layers directly above it. It’s basically an auto ‘color-in-the-lines’. The linework, shadow, and highlight layers are locked, but you can unlock them and dick around with them as you see fit. 

also if you use these it would be super rad if you’d shoot me a message with a link to your griffs because I would totally love to see them!