How to draw a gryphon
The Gryphon (griffin) is a magical animal that comes
equipped with the hind end of a lion and the front end of an eagle.
This would cause the beast some probl
ems, I'm sure, because, if you've ever eaten a chicken and seen
it's bones, you know that the legs on a bird are his hind legs. His
wings are the equivalent of our arms.
Therefore, the Gryphon has two sets of hind legs, which
would make anyone a little grouchy. The picture at the top is from Alice
in Wonderland. His "elbow," just under his tired beak, is really
the heel on a bird (they walk on their toes) so, as a picture, it works
(because the artist left the knees out!) The limb appears to bend in the
right direction, and the animal is believable. As a real animal
it would be a bit awkward, wouldn't it?
Now, let's learn how to draw a magical gryphon!
 People
have been making up animals out of various parts for thousands of years.
One of the most recent conglomerations is Buckbeak, the Hippogryph from
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. J. K. Rowling used the
front end of an eagle and the back end of a horse. I like to think of
Buckbeak as a descendant of a marriage between Pegasus and a Roc. But
that's another story...
The idea of a hippogryph is not really Ms. Rowling's idea, of course.
Like almost all of the magical animals from the Harry Potter books, the
hippogryph is taken from ancient mythology. Buckbeak, according to the
ancients, had a gryphon for a father, and a horse for a mother. If you
would like to draw Buckbeak, you can use these instructions, but substitute
the lioness' back end with the back end of a horse.
One difficult thing about drawing an animal that is made up of parts
of different animals is finding models that are situated in similar poses.
You want your back end going in the same direction as your front end,
after all.
We also need to figure out how to stick on the extra limbs - one main
characteristic of real animals (at least the ones with backbones) is that
we all have four limbs, be they arms, legs, or wings. Six is not
part of the normal plan. But we need to make it look believable!
 I
found photos we can use that are close, but you may want to do some surfing
on the web, using the research method mentioned in the chapter on the
Serpent, to find pictures that you like better.
The eagle showing off his wings is a Golden Eagle, the great head shot
up above is an eagle from Australia called a Wedge Tailed Eagle. You might
like the head down below better, but I thought the Wedge Tailed Eagle
was quite elegant.
 We'll
use the chest from the Bald Eagle, and the Lioness will
loan us her rear end. Whew!
To start off this very complicated drawing, you might want to do a little
more Internet surfing and look at some sites with drawings of Gryphons.
One especially nice one is at: http://gryphonguild.org/tome.html.
It's OK to use other people's drawings for inspiration, and you can even
do a copy for practice, but it is much nicer to create a new drawing,
completely from your own imagination.
At first I thought that it would be easiest to get all the parts to work
together if we draw the front and back half of our Gryphon on separate
sheets of paper and then put the eagle half over the lion half, moving
them around 'till we get something that looks reasonable. But I soon discovered
that it is easiest to make the critter look real if the body, including
front legs, of the lioness is sketched in first. I then used the basic
sketch to change the front legs into eagle parts, and added the wings.
  
Now we have a very rough drawing of an animal that seems to have all
the parts in the right place. I will use this drawing under a clean sheet
of paper, and begin to put in the details. I will pay special attention
to the eyes, and have a lot of fun with the feathers. Since all the lion
parts are behind the eagle parts in the drawing, we won't have to work
at getting the feathers to turn into fur.
 You'll
notice that eagles and hawks have a ridge over their eyes that acts like
a built-in baseball cap, keeping the sun out of their eyes. They hunt
by sight (they can see about three times as well as we can!) and the bony
ridge protects their eyes. It also gives them a somewhat sinister look.
In addition, they have an upturn to the beak that makes
it look like they're smiling, in an evil sort of way. These
qualities are great for adding character to our Gryphon.
OK, now it's your turn! Build yourself a Gryphon using
your own imagination. Or mix and match other animal's parts,
like J. K. Rowling did with Buckbeak.
You might also want to learn how to draw these critters...
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