The Queen and Her Prince

No shading OR background? Lame, I know. But this picture has been sitting around on my computer for over a month, and it's never going to get shaded, so I decided to post it with the flat colors rather than letting it rot as it otherwise would.

This is another illustration for the Banjo-Tooie group fanfic I'm involved in, The Jinjo-Minjo War. This is actually the first time I've illustrated a scene I wrote...

This is actually a flashback... when our favorite Jinjo King is kidnapped and tied up in a forlorn cavern, and he believes his people to all be in immense and imminent peril, he has a breakdown and lapses into a dream-state of sorts. He has several flashbacks, the first of which features him as a very young child, with his mother, the former Queen.

But now he was with his mother again, staring out over a large stretch of the village, the cluster of houses down towards the sandpit and the surrounding cliffs.

“Isn’t it a wonderful place, Jingaling?” asked his mother, looking down at him lovingly. The boy just nodded raptly, taking in the magnificent scene.

“Someday you will look out for this village,” she told him, “and all of its people.”

The boy’s demeanor changed. He seemed concerned, and turned to look upwards at his mother. “It’s so much to take care of!” he said with a worried frown. “What if I can’t do it?”

The Queen picked up her son and held him. “You can do it,” she told him with a gentle smile. “I can help you on the way, and teach you many things, but someday you must be the King on your own. I know you can do it.”

“But what if I’m a bad king?!” he asked, evidently troubled in the earnest way of children. “What would happen to everybody?”

Of course, he is having this flashback because he feels that he has been a bad king after all, despite his mother's faith in him; that he has failed his people.

The Jinjo Queen was kind, gentle, and melancholy, and very fondly attached to her son. However, that doesn't mean she was restrictively overprotective of him. She was very wise... but unfortunately, she did not have as long in the world to guide her son as either of them would have expected. And now, in these times of war for which he feels so ill-suited and misplaced as a leader, he has no guide...

Jinjos/King J (c) Rareware
The Jinjo Queen (c) Me, I guess
The Jinjo/Minjo War (c) the fine folks of the BT forum at Gametalk, which has been down for like a week and a half, and I'm going crazy.

(PS: He's so cute with his liddle pink slippers! XD)