Terryl's theme through the workshop was designing fictional creatures that could theoretically evolve, live, and reproduce in a manner as close to reality as possible. She made a distinction between "chimeric" creatures–beings put together from the parts of various creatures, such as classically mythological creatures like centaurs, griffons, the Sphinx–and "discrete" creatures–beings that could theoretically exist and be molded by time, their environment, genetics, and so on. If they had elements inspired by different creatures, they would be worked into the design as if the creature naturally had those traits. Our mission in this particular workshop was to design flying winged carnivore/predator creatures.
During the workshop, I made two creatures. Since I had sea creatures on the brain, I sketched ideas out for combining various existing animals, and ended up combining a krill and a flying fish to create a flying krill. I envisioned it as a small creature, one that would frequent the very top layers of the ocean, hunting smaller organisms and flying away from danger when threatened. I shortened and smoothed out the krill's body, and gave it angled wings, large enough that it could dart away from danger, but not so large they would interfere with swimming. (Rather, they would assist in helping the krill swim.) It had frilled legs to give it traction against the water and swim properly. And it had the eyespot on its tail to direct its predators away from its vital parts. The feathery antennae should've realistically be more like the actual krill's antennae, but I was feeling fancy and made them frilled like a moth's antennae.
