Early Riser by Lionus (Febuary 1998)

You come down for breakfast and find that your little mate has been ... cooking? :)

After seeing what James Pearson did in coloring "Want to Play?" for me, I decided to take a shot at doing a totally colored pic on my own. "Early Riser" is cartoony in the way I did it since I wanted it to convey a cartoon's light and humorous feeling to get across an early morning's brightness and also suggest the early morning innocence of the leonine character.

Handling bold contrasting colors frightened me when I did this. The wrong color in the wrong place and *BLAM!* the whole picture would be absolutely ruined! Well at least that is what I thought would happen back then. :)

I was still very much an amateur when I did this picture and was heavily dependant on a coloring book style of linework. But since the pic is more in the way of a quasi-cartoon I think I got away with it.