Inspired by the music on the Tall Plains level in The Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning (which is one of my favorite levels in that game, from a design and music point... although it WAS fun chucking Apes and golems off the startlingly-high cliffs with the basic Lightning Breath attack), I wanted to draw a Feathered Serpent Coatl-type dragon on a branch overlooking the Yucatan jungle with the towering temples of a nearby Maya city visible in the distance. I looked at pictures of snakes coiled around branches and depictions of Feathered Serpents to get a good reference for what I had intended. I decided to make the trees look misty, to help indicate this takes place early in the morning and so, I also used a photo of mist over the Yucatan jungle to get a good indication of what I wanted.

The Coatl in Paleoworld is a species of Amphiptere, unique for being covered in feathers as well as its innate magical abilities, notably its ability to shapeshift into a bipedal (or, alternatively, a Naga) form and its limited capacity to control the winds with the wriggling of its serpentine body. It is a dragon well-regarded among the various cultures and peoples of Central America and widely-worshiped, from the enigmatic Olmecs to the opulent (and tyrannical) Aztecs; however, the species was greatly persecuted by the arriving Spanish, both due to its ties to indigenous paganism and due to competition for resting places with the dragons the Conquistadores brought with them to the New World. Today, it is a species protected by the Mexican and Guatemalan governments, and some have returned to old nesting grounds in the Valley of Mexico, despite the increasing urbanization of the cities (including the national capital) surrounding the greatly-diminished lake.