Sorry for not posting yesterday. I decided to take the day off and focus on personal art. I did spend a bit of time thinking about the roughs and where I'd like to go with them though.
I'm going to start off with the Black Gryphon roughs first since I see this cover as the easiest based on what I want. I'd like to create a modern looking cover without a lot of action and pointless detail. I want to focus on the character. Because the title has a color in it, I want to focus on that too. So, I see a pure black silhouette of a gryphon on the cover, stark against the white background, with only his eyes and beak visible. I'm trying out several different compositions with it with varying amounts of dynamic angles in them. To aid in this, I also collected some research pictures of eagles in flight so that I could get some of the anatomy correct.