I've teased working on this in parts here and there for some time now.
This is one of those little side pieces I work on from time to time between other projects. It originally started as a quick fun sketch of one of my beloved's favorite digimon, gatomon. When I started I was very much in this cottagest, warm, relaxed phase and it has been a lot of good for me to come back to work on this between stressful projects.
I had some fun experimenting with this in multiple ways. I've been really testing and trying out new brushes to help speed up and enhance my backgrounds and textiles. Mostly just pushing myself to try features of my program that I've avoided to touch on more serious work. I've also been pushing myself to really adapt my shading and lighting, using more varied colors and trying softer shadows.
What I'm most proud of in this though is the bit of getting back to roots with the background painting. When I was in school a common practice was to look at the work of past masters and do quick recreations, sometimes with our own twist.
I decided I wanted to sneak in my own favorite digimon with gabumon. I ended up basing my study on a piece by Philip Eustace Stretton. Philip was a classic oil painter who often did work featuring dogs and cats. I recreated a work of his, translating it into my lined style and changing the dog and items to reflect the digimon theming. This was fun to experiment with a very painterly style, again pushing me to use tools I haven't touched much of in my program.
Over all this piece took a long time to get done but I'm happy I did. Learned a lot along the way that I will be applying to new work going forward.