Second commission of FWA 2018, this one finds the duo  mettsu (bird) and Tehu (dragon) in a moment. A display of smugness with such power that Tehu had to strike a pose to celebrate it, a move that induces an equally powerful facepalm from Mettsu. Fandom legends say that dragons are most likely to emit this power, and this situation does not disappoint. Well...I don't know exactly how this incident played out prior to this moment, but here is the result.

Technical:
This one beat up my skills a bit. I didn't think about it at the time, but it was the fact that I'd never drawn a bird anthro before. Add to that the sleep issues I was going through in the Artist's Alley that day (i.e. my circadian rhythm was turned around by too many all-nighters) where my body expected to be fast asleep in the early afternoon. Once I was back into the "ok to wake" part of the day I began to translate the details of the reference pic to my drawing style. Tehu was easy by comparison--I finished him rather quickly so that I covered that half of the page to protect it while I fussed with Mettsu. Despite drawing beaks on gryphon characters, another thing that threw me was the narrow beak on the reference pic. Looking at Mettsu's icon as I write this, I definitely would have had less trouble had that pic been the reference :D, and ultimately this was the style I eventually wound up drawing. Only thing I would have changed in a complete redraw is to make both characters taller--I have a habit of compacting torsos that I really need to break out of.

Then after the con comes the usual cleanup for posting. Since this was a few days till I got around to this, I was able to spot a number of deficiencies that begged to be corrected. And that I did, amounting to a substantial re-draw of most of both characters (Tehu benefitted most from this) that substantially smoothed out my inks (which probably explains why Tehu looks more like a digital sketch than a scan of hand-inked pencils). Among the usual physical fixes, I corrected the fit of the clothing to better match the reference pics, and slightly altered Tehu's gaze so he appears to be looking at the viewer.

Pencil on bristol inked with India ink+brush. Digital cleanup with Micrografx Picture Publisher 10 and Krita 3.1.3. 24MB file in Picture Publisher's format, 2.5MB JPG at full size, 1.6mb PNG. Bluetooth transfer to and posted via mobile (android/G.Note 4)