My first take-home commission (because it's a digital color one), this one was initiated at Anthrocon 2013 by  miateshcha for  pavati. The premise of the pic was that Pavati Mistwalker appears in an advertisement for footpaw lotion, which causes a commotion on the highway, as drivers looking up at her billboard become mesmerized by the sight of her footpaws and careen off the road, hence the title of the image above.

Mindful of the exacting specs of the character, I set about to develop this pic in three parts:
1: the character
2: the backdrop, and
3: the cars

That last one was a separate item since I realized upon the first layout sketch, that I didn't know how to draw a decent-looking vehicle. Time for...a crash course in drawing cars.

While I don't see myself ever getting as good as an artist like  skunkworks, who can draw detailed vehicles without any reference, I still needed to draw in some decent looking cars that didn't clash too hard with the rest of the pic. My first attempt consumed a lot of time, and yielded results that were "too right" and "completely wrong" at the same time.

How so? I first tried gathering rear-end views of cars and SUV's from Google Images, then turning them into color vector art (had to learn to do this). At its most successful, the technique involved tracing the general shape of large chunks of the vehicle (side, windows, fenders, etc) then drawing layers of differently-shaded objects atop them to represent shading and reflections, either in solid colors or as gradients. The end results were fantastically professional-looking but suffered from two glaring flaws:

1: the view of the photos were always from the eye level of another driver. This pic required a view behind and above the car.

2: because I worked on the car images separately from the main pic, it wasn't obvious that the images were too realistic-looking.

--By the way, you can view the car vectors ->here<-

So, after vectoring three car images (a 2004 Prius, 2012 Avalon (Toyota) and a Hyundai IX35 crossover SUV) I had to scrap those and start over. But where could I find 3D above-rear-view car images I could trace?

(brainstorm) Video games.

I had a number of Xbox 360 racing games that I could grab screenshots from after some trial-and-error. The Forza games I didn't even try, as I needed run-of-the-mill cars. Driver:San Francisco didn't have any parked vehicles, and you don't have any real control of the camera once outside the vehicle you're controlling. That left Saints Row 3 and GTA 4&5, which not only had random parked cars sitting around that you could walk up to, but camera controls that allow you look at the vehicles from pretty much any angle you desire. I shot photos directly off the TV, then imported them into my regular image editor, skipping the vector step, tracing the outlines of the cars and flat-shading them. This dialed down the realism just enough to not clash with the rest of the image. In the end I used two cars from Saints Row III and one from GTA4 (in the center).

As you might guess from the amount of text I devoted to the process, the cars proved to be the most time-intensive part of the picture. While drawing Pavati's digitigrade paws in forced perspective wasn't particularly easy (being the first time I've done that), they didn't actually take much time overall, since with vectors, I could simply duplicate the better-looking one and reverse it :).

Pencil on bristol, inked in Inkscape(vector), colored in Micrografx Picture Publisher. 114MB at full size.