That's a fancy badger!
Obviously, I really like the whole "animals in period costumes" thing (see my avatar). I've got several more planned for a card game I'm developing.
The way I go about it is to get renaissance paintings for my reference photos and that solves a lot of the issues you are struggling with. My tiger painting is based on a work Rembrandt did.
I'm guessing you will not want to do that since you were a bit skittish about even using someone's color scheme but that is an option. And the point, to me, is not to say: look at this piece that has clothing and colors that I completely invented. But rather: look at this well known painting I tweaked a bit (put my own spin on) to include an animal instead of a human subject.