This cocky cock is shown sprawled onto a Buddha figure, probably in some temple alcove. He might be drunk, or he might just not care, being obnoxious and possibly disruptive. Probably both. The statue itself may look vaguely familiar to those of you who've picked through any Archie McPhee catalog and've seen those cute anthropomorphic cat and dog headed Buddhas. I didn't want to really be that specific about it, so I tried to give the statue a ambiguous feline/caninish head. In the real Buddhist temples I've been too, the depictions I've seen, while of Buddha (a man), have cast him in this highly stylized, almost androgynous, manner. There are a zillion depictions of the guy, some wildly different then others, and I like the ambiguous one the best, very serene and alien and inscruitable.
So I asked Rafferty if I was going to have to limit the breed of dog for this picture of the canine noble to those normally found in the East, etc. thinking I might have to choke down a Shihtzu or Sharpei(uhg!) but, happily, he said that didn't matter and to do what I wanted. So I went the Dalmatian route because I think they're pretty, with all the spots and such. Anyway, here she is, looking demure, opening up an umbrella prior to some sort of stroll. The subtlety is that the umbrella isn't very "user friendly" to those who may want to stand too close to her; they might lose an eye on those prongs(!) I figure it as a passive and quirky way to keep folks from crowding her and asserting her space, making sure she always appears sigular, aloof and unapproachable, even in a crowd. She's also practically buried by her vanity, swimming around in all those hot, heavy layers, hair pulled back painfully tightly, etc.
The big old dragons hang out on rooftops because they're too large to generally fit into most homes built for normal sized furs. And to my way of thinking, dispite their power and age and majesty, or perhaps because of it, they are the most petty and ignoble of the nobles. Highly intelligent, charismatic and devious, they take great delight in the intrigues, politicking, and backstabbing, not to mention the pomp, and regalia, etc. They are quite powerful and vain, and love to fly about from rooftop to rooftop of the nobles and commoners alike, eavesdropping and spying about like any other gossip, collecting secrets and information as power and play. Designwise, I was hoping to have them slightly resemble the kirins, since I believe they are distantly related in myth. I was rooting around for poses and settled on this one, with the dragon sort of half-perched, half-slumped, on the roof, lounging in the twilight.