Talons Dipped In Ink

I’m not dead! Been reconsidering what kind of story I wanted to tell and how I want avians and humans to interact, so I decided to make a flightless avian. I drew inspiration from macaws, kakapo, ostriches, Indian runner ducks, and the Pokémon Latias for the long neck and ear tufts. Still need to do some work on the arm feather shapes and figure out clothing and coloration. I’m tentatively calling them Striders.

They’re semi-arboreal, living in mangrove-like forests interspersed along the floodplain. Their long legs are ideal for wading through water and reaching across branches and aerial roots, while their zygodactyl feet are useful for perching and gripping bark.

Striders eat a diet of nuts, fruits and grains and maintain arboreal gardens of fruit-bearing epiphytes. They also cultivate lily-like aquatic tubers.

Arbormancy is used to construct nest hollows, bridges and other infrastructure from live trees, in addition to speeding up their growth. Some nomadic Striders make a living traveling to human settlements, using arbormancy and other botanical magics to benefit their crops- for a fee.

My “taur” birdfolk may still be part of this story, or they might not- I’ll have to consider what makes sense as I build plot and characters. I’m excited to flesh out Striders’ culture and characteristics!

Hiiii look at my funny bird people 🥺

Some color tests for my birdfolk, each based loosely on a few real-life species. Of course there will be variation within the species depending on age, location and genetic anomalies, but I need to set a "baseline" color form first.

Bonus points for whoever can guess the inspiration species in the tags!

Silly bird people in my sketchbook. Been mulling on a fantasy world with avian people and sentient stone constructs…

Want to develop these guys some more.. initially the plantigrade legs were so they could wear shoes and be distinct from other humanoid avian designs (dnd aarakocra for instance usually have regular bird legs). But I think talons are fun to draw too and can be very expressive. It’s hard to balance design with what might be biologically feasible.. but this is a magic world. Wings can get in the way of silhouettes but they’re such an iconic part of birds I can’t bring myself to get rid of them. I’ll have to do more designing and think about clothes and tools to figure out how these guys work as a species. Also thinking they may end up being smaller than humans- more like halfling a or dwarves in stature to facilitate lighter weight for flight. Songbird lineages are definitely the smallest, then owls are medium sized and hawk+eagle lineages are the tallest. I also need to decide whether they closely mirror real birds or have their own traits.

Here's some size lineups i threw together..

Added myself too bc the "average" human is definitely not 6'0, even if that's a common metric for characters. You can see that even at a similar height to me, the raptor birdfolk have a very slim and lanky build that's mostly muscle and feather. Owl lineage birdfolk are stockier but a lot of their mass is feathers too.