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It’s a swag skyeel…

The greater skyeel family! Can't tell if it's a happy family or not, but definitely a hardcore one. Are skyeel eggs edible? Yes. If you can get your hands on one... and still keep said hands attached.

The greater skyeel display sexual dimorphism in both in color and body size. The female is considerably larger, just like eagles and cassowary on Earth. Greater skyeel eats just about anything, including each other. They do not make good pets due to their aggressiveness, but that never stopped certain people from trying.

The greater skyeel is a voracious and aggressive predator in the skyeel family. Their powerful muscles gives them bursts of speed when needed. Their size and weight prevents them from diving for prey on the ground, so they often go for airborne prey, or sweep prey off trees, rooftops, hill/rock tops.

The Lesser Skyeel, as well as the Greater, display sexual dimorphism in which the sexes appear different. The Lesser Skyeel female and the young are both camouflaged to maximize survival, while the male is fancy to get a date. Instead of an eel, the lesser skyeel is based on lauch fish and a bit of gold fish for derpy look. It is 26cm long, the size of a wooden soup ladle.

This here veers into some serious artistic licenses, lol! I split the official skyeel description into two - the moray look for the Greater, and the color and pattern for the Common. As I mentioned before, it started as one skyeel, but then I went berserk and made three species. The Lesser Skyeel is comparatively smaller than the other two, but still about the size of a Blue Jay. ... I probably should have included the size chart in this upload too, huh? It'll come with the Greater Skyeel batch. So whereas the Common Skyeel is the equivalent of a seagull or petrel, the Lesser Skyeel is the equivalent of a backyard bird, such as the Blue Jay or the Northern Cardinal, or sparrows. ... aw I should've designed a 'bird feeder'. Too late. As such a small species, their color and pattern need to blend in with the environment well. Without illustrating the environment, I used a collage of what I think Rosharan landscape is based on to help with this part.

I had a lot of fun letting my imagination run wild with how else a common skyeels would show up in people's culture: What would skyeel be like as food? How big is a Common Skyeel anyway? Is it steak-size? What would a high-end restaurant premium cut skyeel steak look like? This skyeel bun is inspired by a braided dragon bread my girlfriend and I made recently. All it needs are a pair of wing fins, and some cookie back fins, and there’s a skyeel! Where else would a commonly known animal like the skyeel show up in people culture? Toys, of course! This is a simple wooden toy, lovingly hand-carved by a grandfather for his grand children.

I want to design more than just cool looking creatures. These skyeels are part of a world where people of all species live. They must have a long history of interaction – relationship – with people. So I start to think about how skyeels might be edible, hunted, ‘fished’, with flying baits, of course, since they aren’t fishes that swim under water.

Collection of behavior sketches of all 3 skyeel species showing what their possible interaction with people could be, or just what they might do on their own. Such as chasing down a big, juicy bug for lunch!

This is the skyeel from Roshar, with much artistic licenses added because I was having too much fun visualizing them! It started out as just skyeel, which I decided to expanded into three species to have some more species diversity, and a more natural feeling when populating the world, like a city park would have pigeons, sparrows and starlings. Besides the Common Skyeel, there is the Greater Skyeel, and Lesser Skyeel, because I am great at naming things like that. The Common Skyeel has a difficult balance to strike – it needs to not compete in coolness with the Greater Skyeel, which is set at boss level, but also not as drab and blending-in as the Lesser Skyeel despite it being the most … well, commonly seen around by people! Like a seagull, but cooler, but not too cool. For that reason Common Skyeel remains the only design that has the same color, pattern, and size between female and male. It is also the last of the three I designed, but somehow ended up being the standard to which I adjust the other two Skyeel designs to make the Greater fittingly boss-like, and the Lesser accordingly humble. That seemingly little egg there took me a while to settle on! So I must ramble about it here. Skyeel is a fish, that flies in air, taking up the same niche as birds do on Earth. So does it still lay eggs? What shape and surface if they're exposed to the elements? How does the baby break out? Does skyeel birth live pups like some sharks do? What is the morphology - the baby looks exactly like adult but miniature (sail fish), baby looks partially like adult (birds), or a complete metamorphosis (tadpole/frog)? When everything is possible, it's impossible to just settle on one. But I had to, so I did, otherwise my life cannot go on... There are a total of 6 pages, and I'm posting them here in set of 3 so as to not spam so much. If they're small or blurry, you can see bigger resolution on my Artstation

These are color thumbnails for the Common Skyeel. They start out overly vibrant and coral-theme, then slowly finding a sweet spot between too noisy and blending-in, looking too much like an Earth seagull, and feeling just about right.

That is the very first design I sketched for the Common Skyeel, upper left corner! It has changed so much... The Common Skyeel’s place in the Rosharan ecosystem – as I imagine it – is akin to a seagull. It’s designed with long wings to coast long and steady in the air, and a streamline body. The fin designs need to walk a fine line between being cooler than the Lesser Skyeel, while staying clear of the Greater Skyeel’s thunder.

The Common Skyeel nests high up on vertical surfaces such as cliffs, walls, and underneath roofs to keep its young safe from scavengers and predators. In this sketch, the Skyeel pup looks exactly like the adult, just miniaturized, in the same ways that marlins are on Earth. I've made 2 other Skyeel metamorphosis possibilities, and demonstrated them with 2 other Skyeel designs, Greater Skyeel, Lesser Skyeel (very creative at naming things, I am :P)

The common skyeel of Roshar nests high on cliff faces to shelter their young from high storms. Once their chick matures, they would take the leaf of faith from hundreds of meters above ground to learn how to fly - or fall to their deaths.

Sketches of common coastal skyeel with possible variations of head shapes. They might be the equivalent of something like a skua or gull, and whatever preys upon them would be Roshar's equivalent of sea eagle. Maybe there's even a smaller variant of skyeel that is the equivalent of tern birds.

As the third in my series of my Roshar origami, I've finally done one with actual origami paper instead of printer paper. Once again, Mistborn is my platform. I hope you like it!

Since skyeels are amazing, I ended up painting one as well :-). Painted in FreshPaint using the watercolor brushes.

S is for Skyeel, another page from the Vorin children's alphabet book.