You're walking down the corridor on the way to the dining car when your eyes suddenly meet hers - a very fashionable white kitten with the loveliest, sparkling blue pools for eyes you've ever stared into.
Do you...?
A. Stop her with a smile, introduce yourself like a gentleman, and after a brief conversation ask her to join you in the dining car, go to page 52.
OR
B. Quickly break eye contact with the fashionable kitty, shuffle along nervously look at how your shiny shoes blind you in the blaze of the afternoon sun and miss yet another opportunity to meet new and interesting people, go to page 7.
Remember those Choose Your Own Adventure game books? What fun I remember reading those as a kid!
I feel as though something like that is happening in this illustration. The viewer is placed in the action of this scene that could easily be a black-and-white classic Noir genre film (if we turned down the color saturation) only this time with animal-people characters where the romantic interest has just been introduced to you, the protagonist of the story who's probably in some deal of trouble but not necessarily of his own making.
What happens next?
This digital painting started out as a sketch in SketchbookPro of the main feline character which was later brought into PaintTool SAI and colored there, with the rest of the scene being drawn/colored in PaintTool SAI as well. Some Photoshop tools were used as well, but mostly this was a SAI project.
Clickable gallery
In the background can be seen a father and son giraffe playing the paper, rock, scissors game. It was my first time to draw giraffe-people and enjoyed putting them in the back drop to give balance against the kitten and establish a sense of depth in the scene.
My hope for this art work was immersion. My hope is that the viewer is drawn into the image and feels as though he or she is an unseen character looking into this world while walking down the corridor.
View the full version hosted at my Character Issues DeviantArt Gallery.