Idk what came over me, I thought "wait what if I made my own creature!grian design", blacked out, and came to with this design
I'm a sucker for explaining as well, so I'll explain some of my decisions with this design under the cut below!
starting off with the overall features, I knew I wanted to design a winged creature inspired from birds; I didn't have an exact bird in mind while drawing, but I think I ended up accidentally giving the design an owl-like appearance, which I don't mind at all! I gave him big ole' eyes with very large irises to reference the fact grian's skin has two black lines for eyes, which made the design end up a lot cuter than intended lmao (also I noticed while drawing the front that he kinda looked like Trico from The Last Guardian, which made me a little happy bc I like that game)
I honestly wanted his design to have a third set of wings but the body didn't have enough room and I didn't want to make the torso too long, so I stuck to just two sets; that did encourage me, however, to draw his ears to look a little like wings, which you can see more of in the side profile
I knew as soon as I decided to make a creature design that I wanted to have him have a peacock tail- mainly for a watcher reference, but also bc I thought it would be cool! The shape and way the feathers are do more resemble a turkey tail tho lmao
moving onto the colors, I thought giving him a base of a beige-brown gradient would be fitting bc it kinda matches the range of hair colors I've seen people give grian when drawing him. For the wings I wanted a more red hue to them to bring some red into the design since it's kinda grian's signature color and as a reference to his sweater. I didn't want them to be a solid red color tho, so I made it more of a red-brown gradient that fades into the body color. As for the tail, I decided to get creative; I wanted to add purple around the largest eye spots near the edge of the tail as an evo reference, and so I landed on doing a purple-red/magenta gradient because I thought it looked nice. The teal for the eye spots themselves was kinda random at first since I just thought the color would be a nice compliment, but then I realized the color kinda made the eye spots look like eyes of ender, which I thought was neat.
Anyways, I hope this design is bussin'. And depending on how much time I have free this week, I might start working on some other creature designs for other hermits *COUGH*BOATEM*COUGH*
