Argh! There's no 'gryphon' species listed! *cries* I guess 'eagle' will have to do.

I couldn't decide which of these I wanted to post, and I didn't really want to post them separately, so I'm posting them together. The B&W on the left is the scan of the original pencil drawing, and the one on the right is the colorized version I did in Painter a few months later. This is my mate's character that he asked me to draw for him. Doesn't he look smexy? <3

This is what I originally said about the B&W on dA:
"I've had many ideas for new drawings but the Christmas season prevented me from having any time to work on them. But then my mate started describing to me his idea of what a gyphon would look like, and after several days of discussing it I finally said, "Hmm... maybe I should draw this". Since this offhand comment unleashed a flood of further details about said gryphon form I figured he was hinting pretty strongly that I follow through. So, many hours and versions of digitigrade legs later, I finally came up with this, and I'm pretty darned proud of it. ^_^

Any comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated - my artistic temperment needs continual reassurances. :)

On the off chance you can't tell, this is an anthro golden-eagle gyphon."

So, which version do you like better? Pencil or color?