Griffons

Custom Project - July 2019

 

A griffon is a magical creature with the body of a lion, the King of Beasts, and the head, wings, and front legs of an eagle, the King of the Air. My Dungeons & Dragons character recently got a Griffon mount, so I wanted to build a model of a griffon. I searched online and couldn't really find any I loved to build that were close to the size I wanted. Ideally, I'd like one about the size of a Lego horse.

So for my first effort, I ordered a plain centaur base from Brickforge, added a brown minifig torso with its arms ripped off, some wings I had, and the head of a Chima figure. It took just a little messing around to figure out how to make it look as much like a griffon as I could, and still be able to have a minifig ride on it. Technically, it's a hypogriff - eagle front on a horse body. Not exactly what I wanted, but close enough for gaming purposes. So that's Version 1, which is the size I wanted, but isn't as elegant as it could be.

 But THEN, I got the Lego 75952, Newt's Case of Magical Creatures. And one of the creatures is a Thunderbird, which gave me an eagle's head, wings, claws, and some other bits and pieces to play with. In fact, I started by just adding another pair of connection knobs to the same body, closer to the front, and moving the bird legs up, then started trying to build cat legs for the back. That gave me a framework to start on, and I think I would have done fine with that eventually.

However, I looked around my Lego room, and I spotted my Chima Wolf Legend Beast. This is a wolf build about the same size as the Thunderbird, and set up for a minifig to ride on it. I took the back legs off the wolf and put them on my modified Thunderbird, and realized the two could be combined pretty well. And looking at the two bodies, the wolf body was already set up for four legs, and balanced pretty well. So I moved some of the bricks with feathery sticker decorations over from the bird. I ended up mostly taking apart both models trying to put them together, of course. The wolf head is all that remains of that model, but I've kept it intact, because it's pretty neat, too.

But eventually I combined the two models pretty well, and got a serviceable griffon. I wanted a longer neck, so I added a bit, and then had to figure out how to flesh it out a little bit. I tried to use as many of the decorated pieces from the wolf as possible. I pulled some pieces of tails out of my storage and gave it a tail more suitable to cat than wolf, and I'm pretty pleased with the resulting griffon.

Here he is, ready to fly off into the sky.

I took a shot from the rear, showing the tail I crafted from leftover parts. Since he's a flying creature, I added a couple of rudder-like mini-wings to help him stay steady.

 And the model's very poseable, too. Here he is about to attack, with talons outspread and beak open. And another pose of him with wings down ready to be petted.

Of course, this guy is way too large for D&D purposes, but he's pretty to just keep because I love him.

And then, of course, Lego came out with Hagrid's Hut: Buckbeak's Rescue, which includes a molded hypogriff figure.

So now I have a hypogriff figure for D&D, and my custom-built griffon for display.

Then, of course, because I was thinking about them, I ran across a few more griffins. One RPG mini one, and one from some other kind of toy system. So now there's a shelf of griffs.