This is a very nice beasty!

Compliments on a few things as I savor this piece:

--I'm especially liking the shape of the head, with its little teeth of thorns off of it. I've loved beasts where if you were to pet or touch them might make you have to be cautious to do so, though not impossible.
--The texturing. I really love the texture that feathering is implying. It sort of looks like it might be soft as feathers and fur, or tough as hardened armor. What's a beasty if it isn't tough skinned?
--The musculature is what I look for in beasts. Taunt hide, narrowed belly but a powerful front end and neck.
--The claws. Damn those claws! I've no idea what those might be inspired from, but I like them lots. A break from the norm perhaps of having wicked sickle shaped claws. Like these are meant to pierce into something rather than to grab hold of prey.
--The wings! I do not believe I've ever actually seen a wings design of this nature, where the wing membranes are actually attached down a significant length of the tail like that. Very sexy hybridized nature there! Sorry to liken it to something of a flying squirrel, but that's the only thing that I think replicates this kind of thing. Flying squirrel mixed with western dragon with those broad awesome wings.

The little things that I think its missing:
--I love horns, so to me this really is only missing a grand set of them off of its head.
--A sense of scale. Hard to tell for me if this is a monsterous mountain epic size beast, or if those are just disturbances on the terrain and its actually no bigger than a horse. Could've used something more definite, but since nothing a quick look through the first five pages of your gallery doesn't seem to indicate anything macro sized, its probably safe to say its a small-ish critter.

Anyways, those are my thoughts. I found you randomly off of FA's front page by the way.

--Mozdoc

Hey! For a sense of scale here's his brother Manovanov: linky (different mothers :P). Bakarus, the dragon in the image, is a bit larger but about the same size.

As for horns, he's missing them because they'd get in the way. Bakarus is a kind of dragon that lives underground (lots of caverns where they live though, so wings are still great), thus horns could be hazardous.

Oh my. Pretty.

Thanks for some of the background. That's kind of essential stuff to know.

I think I might be checking in on this artist from time to time.

--Mozdoc