Ho~! Well... actually, my problem with my jurors usually was that I oft times just had way TOO much to say. I be a big babbler, see...? Especially when I get started upon my characters and stories. X'D So I usually had to face the doom fate of me jurors starting to fall asleep after half an hour of babbling.

But yeah, they usually do want something very 'local'. They still do actually. Galleries that is (now), not the jurors. 'Tis a fate that the lot of us will have to forever struggle with. As for myself though, unlike what all I've seen of your work so far, I was always partial to the Persian school. Those produced in the Safavid times in particular. Once I got round to combining those with my own style though, I could easily justify it, since the Persian masters and modern manga loosely share the same roots. Though I kind of think, after 15 minutes of eating the poor jurors' heads off just about this and they were willing to even believe that Behzad was a cat, if only to just shut me up.

Are you in your thesis year? I don't know if you noticed, but I actually do have me old thesis up in me scraps. That might give you a clue as to how I went about developing what I picked. Which was basically, alchemy. And while most people tend to dismiss alchemy as a very 'european' art of mumbo-jumbo-ness, they kind of don't realize that it is actually in truth very arab. Al-Khemia. First discovered and poked about with by the sages on this side of the land.

Sooooo... basically... I kind of believe everything basically links back to one part of the world or the other. When you say that the Tolkien-ish world interests you, may it be the people or the deities, you might find that certain things are reflected back in various tales and mythologies from all over the world. Let's say.... perhaps one could loosely compare the One King and the Nazgul to... the Zoroastrian Ahriman and the daevas? Or even the Valar to the elder gods, the Titans? And then, how all the hierarchy of all the world's great myth-religions just seems to... reflect and mirror each other.

*babble babble*

Er... well... I have no clue if any of this at all was relevant or helpful. It's just about knowing what you are doing, looking at it from all sides, and making sure you know that you are prepared to answer any person might throw at you. Convincingly. Once you have that down, methinks one can do aaaaaanything at all~