So, here's my first illustration of the series. I'm halfway through a second one too.

I wanted to start with a few featuring just Rusty on his own, to see if I can work some of the kinks out of the art style before doing anything more. And... yeah. I've got a few problems to work out. I intend to finish and post my second illustration, but then I need to go back in and tweak the character design a bit. A few of the fur patterns, especially on the face, are hard to place, and I need to draw references of the head from a few different angles. I need to be able to draw him consistently over multiple illustrations, in multiple poses. It wouldn't hurt to do a base set of expressions for reference too. Seriously. This one turned out fine, but I keep having to redraw the profile view of the head I ended up going with for the second one. I cant seem to avoid making him look like an old man for some reason.
This scene is from Rusty's first introduction in the book, where he's asleep and dreaming about being in the forest. It's dark, it's quiet, there are small animals shuffling around in the leaves, and he doesn't have his collar on. He feels free. Content. And then he wakes up, and it's back to life as usual. It felt like a good scene to start with.
I really wanted to make various parts of the scene look like household items, like ceiling fan "leaves" or potted houseplants or something, but it was hard to make it work. I settled for electrical wires winding around the "tree" and a set of fake leaf garlands with fairy lights for "foliage" but I'm not sure how well those come across. I also stuck in the faint outline of a window for the light source, but I feel like I could have made it more obvious. It should be a bit more apparent in context with the next illustration.
Over all, my biggest goal with doing these illustrations, especially as a series, using the same character designs, is to learn more about the illustrative process and improve. I've definitely picked up an a few things I need to work on, just from these first few tentative ventures. Just need to keep going.
Here's the current character design, although again, I plan on tweaking this.

Plus an older version, which will need to be modified accordingly.
https://www.deviantart.com/turnipberry/art/Don-t-Wake-Up-851809403