Artwork – K. Vale Nagle

FlamSinger's color artwork of Emin, the Seraph King from the novel Opinicus by K. Vale Nagle. Emin is mostly white on the underside and grey on the top side with black around the shoulders of the wings inspired by a white-tailed kite. His beak is black, as are his talons, and his digits/legs are yellow. He looks like a gryphon whose back legs are feathered like a microraptor, whose forelegs also work wyvern-like like hands, with another pair of wings on his back. His form is long and noodle-like, with a long tail ending with a feathered tuft. He has a long neck, and his facial expression is arrogant and derisive, the only seraph in a land of gryphons... at least for a few hours.

The fan art page is now live! Since Flam Singer was the last person to share fan art, I thought I’d start with all of Flam’s works and go from there. My plan is that when I need a break from writing, I’ll pick an artist and get all of their pieces added. I’ve had a lot of fans ask where the best place to see all of the fan art is, and hopefully, by the end of the year, the answer will be here.

The Fan Art Page: https://kvalenagle.com/fanart/
Places you can find Flam: https://linktr.ee/FlamSinger

I’ve shared this before, but because I started out in mystery, horror, and literary fiction, I never expected anything I write to inspire fan art. My love of gryphons appears to be infectious, however, and there are well over 100 pieces of fan art and a dozen fanfics. I’ve had the most touching fan letters, and I’ve signed hundreds of books at this point. (Not too shabby for an immunocompromised author who doesn’t get out much!)

I’ve seen artists use GryphIns characters as examples for animation commissions, I’ve seen fan art end up on tie dyed t-shirts, I’ve seen dozens of original characters created set in the world of Belamuria, and I’ve even had artists reach out to say that I was wrong in my author’s note for Crestfall to exclude vampire finch gryphons, and here was art to prove that point.

It’s been a delightful journey, and it’s still going. While all of Flam Singer’s pieces are on the fan art page, linked above, here’s just a few of my favorites from over the years. And if you enjoy them, feel free to stop in and tell him so on Blue Sky or Patreon =]

Flam Singer once asked the important question: What if feathermanes had pony manes instead of lion manes?

Flam had the very first fan art of Ninox.

One of my favorite gryphons from Eyrie who never gets any cover love is Hatzel, so I reached out to Sydney Moncrief who sometimes does concept art work for me and asked if she’d take a stab at bringing Hatzel to life.

Hatzel was the first gryphon I created after Zeph. She’s there in the second scene and serves as a calm, responsible foil for the other characters. While being a strong, smart leader is core to her character, I wanted her to visually be a more prehistoric design than most gryphons. She should be scary when she wants to look imposing.

I’d been studying wingspan lengths in living creatures to get a feel for how big an animal could be and still fly. For the pterosaur (think pterodactyl or pteronadon) Hatzegopteryx, the answer was… well, the size of a giraffe. For raptors, Haast’s eagle had a wingspan around 9 feet and hunted moa, essentially giant ostriches. To say both animals inspired Hatzel’s name is spot on.

When I first sketched Hatzel, I knew there was a jag in her beak, but it became more pronounced as I wrote. Haast’s eagle went extinct a couple hundred years ago, so that got me thinking about prehistoric birds and cats not normally used in gryphon creation. I began to wonder if I could pronounce the beak jag into something even more fierce, reminiscent of a saber-toothed tiger.

Since her coloring has always been dark, “nearly black below the canopy where the light doesn’t reach,” I was worried about comparisons with Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon’s Skandranon, the eponymous Black Gryphon from the famous Valdemar books. I asked Sydney to consider the cooper’s hawk (Zeph) and magpie (Xavi) gryphons of her pride and add a little hint of each, hence the white highlights.

I’ve been using the term “saberbeak” to refer to Hatzel’s gryphon species. Where a lot of the gryphon prides in Eyrie are composed of similar species—harpy eagles for Merin’s, kakapo for the Parrotface Pride, Shrikes/Caracals for the kjarr and bog prides—I wanted Hatzel’s pride to be a mix of several smaller prides that couldn’t stand on their own.

I might delve into Hatzel’s back story more in a short story one of these days if people are interested. I feel like back story in novels is fluid: I come up with something detailed for every character and use that to influence my writing of their scenes, but it’s not set in stone until I commit it to writing that other people see.

Bonus Trivia! Another design I considered for Hatzel, one that would have emphasized her size even more, used a terror bird as her front half instead of a Haast’s eagle. Unfortunately, being flightless, that gave her smaller wings. Here’s Sydney’s rendition of a smilodon + terror bird gryphon. What do you think?

Feral Fantasy Author

Tag: Artwork

Fan Art Page Launches with Flam Singer

Gryphon Profile: Hatzel