Tag: gryffins

Gryffins: Oh God There’s More

Laura Highcove

Yes, this is the last installment of my collection of gryffins. For now …

Gryffins in Plush

My collection of gryffin stuffed animals, because of course I have some to snuggle with.

The biggest gryphon (back left) is actually a puppet my mother bought for me. The one with the wild eyes (back right) I saw at a store one day. The one that looks like it has a cutie mark (front right) is from Busch Gardens where they have the griffon roller coaster*. There is also the gryphon plush I bought for World of Warcraft (front middle) that came with an in-game pet (I just never got a screen-shot of while I was still playing the game.) The round one (front left) is a limited edition griffin from Squishables. I actually missed the first run of them and only managed to grab one from the second (and final) run.

*More on this later. 😀

Gryffins in Cards

Magic the Gathering has a good and fairly constant set of griffin cards that come out. While I don’t have all of them (I’ve kinda fallen off on keeping up with the sets.) I do have a good number of them. I even have some that aren’t considered griffin cards, but that have griffins features in the art.




Other Gryffins

I also have a mug. It is also from the Griffin roller coaster in Bush Gardens like the plush.

And this gryffin sconce was made by a local artist. It sits just above my bed. Yes, the colors don’t really go with the wall color, but there you have it.

Gryffin Sightings

And here are examples of gryffin sightings in the wild.

This is the rollar coaster from which come the gryffon plushie and mug. It is at Busch Gardens in Williamsburg and is my favorite rollar coaster because if you get in the front row, you really feel like you’re flying.

This is a bar I passed by while in Las Vegas. I don’t drink, however, I had to record my #gryffinsighting.

And there you have it. That is my collection of gryffin-related items. Thanks for putting up with a bit of my insanity.

Gryffins: In Solid Form

Laura Highcove

This is the third of a trio of posts showing off my gryffin collection.

Gryffins as Figures

A whole bunch of gryffin figures I have found in various places.

A rather typical looking gryffin (front left), a humanoid gryffin with a hammer (front right), and why yes, that is a humanoid gryffin riding a gryffin (back), thank you for asking.

Ignoring the little gold guy in front who should’ve been in the other picture, these are all pre-painted miniatures from Dungeons and Dragons. Flying gryffin (front left), stalking gryffin (front right), and lady riding sideways flying gryffin (back).



This guy is from Warhammer. Before and after pictures. I did all the modding to make it as High Elf as possible myself.

And this is Klesk, the mini for a D&D character from a 4th ED One Piece Campaign. This mini was modded pretty hard by a friend and painted by me.

I also got Sonic Boom from Skylanders. And Gilda, who was a character in the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic series.

I spotted these guys …I forget where, and while they remind me a bit more of a shisa with wings, I decided they were close enough to go in my gryffin collection.

This guy I bought a million years ago in 2003. He was meant to sit on top of your monitor. Yeah, remember when monitors wern’t flat? I do.

Gryffins in Stone

One Otakon there was a booth in the dealer’s room that sold jewelry, along with animals carved out of gemstones. I only picked up one at the time and later regretted it since the store wasn’t online anywhere for me to pick up more. It wasn’t until years later that I found them sold on ebay, so over time I collected a number of them.

I am very particular about the shape of the head. Sometimes there are ones for sale with huge bulbous heads, and I leave those ones alone. And the strawberry quartz one just ended up being bigger than the others. I didn’t realize it until it came in the mail.

And yes, that is just one more chunk of my collection. (You’re starting to think I’m crazy aren’t you? /cackles) Next post will show the rest of them.

Gryffins: In Books and Video Games

Laura Highcove

So in putting together a post containing my gryffin collection I made a discovery. My gryffin collection is large, and so I decided to create a few different posts to show it off, rather than trying to stuff everything into one post. So this is the first post of three.

Gryffins in Books

I mentioned last week that one of the things that started me on my love of gryffins was the Mercedes Lackey series starting with The Black Gryphon. This was one of the first fantasy series I ever read. I don’t remember if I picked up this series because of the gryphons, or if it was just a happy accident.

I also mentioned the Protector of the Small series by Tamora Pierce, which doesn’t feature griffins in the entire series, but does have the main character Kel take care of a griffin kit for a while before it’s parents come to take it back. This series I read because I loved the Lioness Quartet and it just happened to have griffins in it.

I have also picked up a few series because they feature gryffins:

The Fallen Moon series I wasn’t super thrilled with. It started out good, but I think in trying make both the protagonist and antagonist human, the author ended up making neither all that likable and I wasn’t sure who I was supposed to be rooting for by the end.

The Gryffin Mage series was a unique take on griffin mythology, where they were creatures of pure magic born out of fire (I think) and while they could think and speak, the author was successful in getting across their unique way of being.

And I have also run into them in other books quite by accident.

This gryffin pops up in the first volume of Magic Knight Rayearth (it’s a manga) where a wizard summons one for them to ride around on a bit.

And also in the book, the Copper Promise by Jen Williams where gryffins are featured as a plot point later in the book. (It’s not a spoiler.) No picture of this one because there’s no picture of a gryffin.

Gryffins in Video Games

Gryphons existed within the World of Warcraft MMORPG that was crazy popular many years ago. I was actually a hardcore raider for a number of years. Anyway, gryphons are used by the humans of the alliance for their flight paths. Ie, you would talk to a flight master and a gryphon would pop out and fly you to your destination. If members of the other faction try to kill the flight master, the second picture is what would happen.


In the expansions, gryphons became mounts you could buy and use to fly yourself around. I count this as part of my collection because I did “acquire” all of the different types of gryphon mounts you could have and technically they still exist on my account even if I don’t play anymore. The first picture are two versions of the slower gryphon mounts, and the second picture is the faster armored version.


If you’re interested in seeing the other versions, here’s a link. I don’t have the High Priest’s Lightsworn Seeker (Though now that I see it, I’m rather regretful. My main was a priest.) or the two grand mounts. Those all came out after I stopped playing.

So there’s all my gryffins for this installment. More coming soon.

I Love Gryffins!

Laura Highcove

I have loved gryffins pretty much my entire life. While I love mythological creatures in general, gryffins have always held a special place in my heart.

One of the first fantasy books I ever picked up for myself was The Black Gryphon by Mercedes Lackey. It’s possible that part of the reason I loved it so much were the illustrations at the beginning of every chapter of the main characters. I will often pick up a book series just because it features gryffins. I’ve had varying levels of success with this, but I am always happy when a gryffin shows up in a book/movie unexpectedly.

So what is a gryffin? Wikipedia gives a good enough explanation. Basically, a gryffin is a magical creature that has the body of a lion, the wings, head, and front feet of an eagle. Some have feathered ears (I prefer it this way), some don’t have the front feet of the eagle and instead continue with lion for the whole body.

Two things influenced the way I saw gryffins early in my career. One is that there seems to be no ‘right’ way of spelling gryffin, and tons of ‘correct’ ways. As such, I decided to spell it gryffin because I like the letter ‘y’ (I think, perhaps, because it was the only ‘vowel’ in my last name growing up.) and I also liked the look of the double ‘f’ over the ‘ph’. As such: gryffin.

The second was Tamora Pierce’s Protector of the Small series, in which the main character, Kel, is forced to raise a baby gryffin for a while. When the parents finally come to get the baby, they give Kel some of their feathers which give truesight. I latched onto this idea of gryffins being the embodiment of truth as well as protectors (usually of treasure, but I took liberties with that.)

This is much of the way gryffins are portrayed in The Law of the Prince Charming’s world. Gryffins (Though we only meet one in the book.) have the Laws of Truth and Protection, as well as Wings and Wind. Though none of my other books have really made it ‘out there’, they tend to always have a gryffin in them somewhere. In fact, the first story I ever wrote that made it to 100 pages in a word document (I didn’t know about counting words back then) was about gryffins.

Stay tuned for more pictures (and explanations) of the gryffins I have collected. I have lots.

Gryffin Detail

Laura Highcove

So I continue to be needlessly intimiatated by the tedious detail required for the feathers on my gryffin model. So two weeks ago I just sat down and did the outline for all of the remaining feathers on one wing. I didn’t like it at the time, but now after coming back to it, I feel a lot better about how it looks. So at some point I’m sure I will convince myself to do the other wing…

Gryffin Update

Laura Highcove

So I have been doing a lot of work on the warhammer gryffin. Besides the modeling work to put it together, and turn Karl Franz into a high elf with a high elf spear, and Will shaving off the “karl Franz” from the breast plate piece I wanted to use, there was some actual painting.

First thing I did was spray paint it black. I prefer black. Dunno why. White spray paint and I don’t really get along. Then I painted the top of the wings the foundation blue, and the bottom of the wings foundation light gray. (Yeah, I could look up their actual names, but blech.)

And then the blue got a blue wash, and the gray got a black wash. Crazy innovative rite?

Then I put white on the underside of the wings, leaving the dark recesses, but my white and I have never really gotten along (it’s something about that color, I swear) so a lot of places ended up grayer than I wanted. It was horrible and tedious. (The picture below only the chest has the white done, the wings are still only gray with a black wash.)

Then I used pictures of red-tailed hawks as inspiration, and painted on scorched brown (I use that brown a lot, so I remember it’s name!) patterns to the underside of the wings. Also stupid tedious.

But then! After I had painted on the brown, I didn’t like the look of the white, since it was so uneven and streaky looking, so I threw another black wash over the underside of the winds. For a bit I panicked, thinking I had ruined everything, but I went back and outlined the feathers in white, and started making white detail pulled from the outside of the feather toward the inside in uneven strokes, and it’s actually starting to look really good. Just more tedium. So below you can see the brown patterning, and on the right wing (your left) the first five primaries have the new white detail.

Griffy!

Laura Highcove

So by the name of my site, you might be able to tell that I like gryffins. Today at the store Blake gave me the new Warhammer: Karl Franz on Deathclaw. I don’t play Warhammer, I just paint the miniatures I like (you’ll see a lot of my high elves in later posts) so I wasn’t really keeping up with the new models coming out. This one was a complete surprise as a belated birthday present. As of now I’ve just cut it out and pieced it together with painter’s tape. It is quite the impressive figure. I’m going to have to do some modding to it to make the rider a high elf (since that’s my favorite army) and make the gryffin’s armour look a little more high elfy.

I’m planning on the body being painted like a black leopard, with blue overtones. Not sure on what bird I’ll model the head and wings, or I might just wing it. Haha. Get it?