@Kigerneko: Thank you, I am glad to be participating again.
@Kreyhardt: I will start as soon as possible, which is probably somewhere next week, since I took some days off for the holidays.

For now, here is my inspiration:

(Birds of prey.)






(Birds of paradise.)

(Toothiana concept art from rise of the guardians.)

(Harpy.)

Some more brainstorming.
I addded my personal information to the first topic, so I am now elligible.

Also, I settled on a name, though it is still subject to change...
With help of the trusty fantasy name generator I found a couple of names I like.
In no particular order:
- Endeis
- Vestele
- Lyra
- Airya
- Veryre

They are a warrior from a humanoid birdlike race.
I will mix features from birds of prey and birds of paradise and perhaps some other animals.
The design will be elegant, but the character will be bulky and tank-like.
I might think about doing some sort of armour, but I might like the character without clothes, so I will have to experiment.

There we are!

Here are my first design sketches!

@Steve_Kim Thank you!
@ajramsey Cool! I love harpies! The way this design is going this is going to be a harpy too.
@sanguine Thanks! I love birds as well.

New sketches. I pretty much settled on the base anatomy, so I tried drawing out some details.

(Also, I kind of drew this in reverse. I started with the base anatomy on the left, but then I drew from the far right to the middle.)

Colour variations:
[wrong picture, whoops]
Based on the colours of a couple tropical birds. I will do a couple more I think.

@Steve_Kim Will do. Right now, I'm still experimenting. First I'll try out some other birds and see what I like. I will probably end up mixing and matching.
Also, I just noticed the colours are way more saturated here than they are supposed to. (I realised, I saved the file as cymk, that's why the colours are all wonky. Oops.)

Here is how it is supposed to look:
The colours are still bright, but not as straining to the eye.

@Kreyhardt Thank you. I think so too. However, I still have a bunch more iterations.

More tropical birds, with more muted colour schemes this time:

More colour schemes. These are based on birds of prey:

I collected my personal favourites in one picture and included the names for those who are curious:

Right now I am leaning towards either nr. 1 or nr. 2, but I also like elements from nr. 6.

Playing with colour schemes on the faces:

I like nr. 2 and nr. 5, because the red resembles warpaint and I like nr. 3 because it looks alien.

Mixing and matching my favourites:

Whelp, I seem to have misplaced my tablet pen. Usually I find it within a couple of days, but it's been more than a week now and I am pretty sure I looked everywhere.
So I don't think I will be able to finish this piece on time...
I've been looking into replacing it, but a new pen would cost than my crappy old tablet is even worth anymore, so I might as well get a new tablet. So yeah, I'll be doing that.
I will be returning to this piece later. I could do some basic sketches and thumbnails traditionally in the meantime.

@moirae
Thank you. The red breast seems like I good idea. Sadly I didn't get to try it out.

Obviously, I am not going to make the deadline...
(I went without tablet for almost three weeks and then I was sick for a while and now I am swamped in other work... I will finish this in my own time. )

I wish everyone else the best of luck. I already saw some awesome entries out there.