Progress on kitty painting...now it has a background in progress

Here's my Prissy Kitty digital painting so far, with a background started today. I'm following the basic steps in a tutorial on building up a 3-dimensional cartoon-like image.

This image feels like it's on track thanks to tutorial

I had been working on this image bit by bit, while learning to use Corel Painter AND my Wacom tablet. This tutorial was perfect for developing my image properly in terms of digital painting steps. I like the image in my head so much, that I'm being quite tedious in my process.

I went too far into my shading and highlighting earlier, trying to establish some depth to the character, before I found this tutorial. Depth can be established by painting, like in real life, with tints and shades of colours. That is was I initially did here. I also tried some dodge and burn tools that other tutorials suggested, after laying down a relatively flat colour to work with. It's useful to get practice in both.

And thanks to the Corel Painter Getting Started Guide I mentioned in my last post, I'm finding tools faster and more reliably already! And with only an hour of practice so far.

This tutorial starts out with blocked-in colours (in Photoshop I believe) then lighting effects, then details. The background is dealt with fairly late in the process, which suits this image similarly to the example shown in the tutorial. We'll see how it plays out in Painter and my kitty drawing. I'm still intending to have a leering glance on her, being interrupted by an admiring passerby looking at her shiny and clean coat of fur.