“You can put lenses over your human eyes that will make them look different.”

(Better than torturing fish.)

Okay, so what do griffins look like? The body is — mostly a lion, he thinks? — and lions are light brown. Light brown pigment in the glass, for starters, done.

Head of a giant eagle. Eye position — tricky. No, wait, she's already dedicated enough to this to want to try to see through fish eyes. Okay, optics so forward-facing human eyes can look sideways instead. Disguising tints. Nothing to be done about blinking.

He knows being a quadruped in the obvious way is terrible for the neck no matter what, so put legs in the front legs. Big griffin. Feet aren't human, so hide the human feet in the knees. Eagle feet.

The hind end won't contain any of her (his, for now) body so it's just a lion-shaped shell, but that doesn't matter to how it will move. Put some ballast in for balance. Cargo space.

Wings. Eagle wings. She probably wants to look like a live animal, not just have the form of one, so detail the feathers and coloring. Feathers other places feathers go.

“How's this?”