Hi and thanks so much for everything you wrote!
I feel like one can mix and match anything stylistically as long as one goes about it sincerely. I did have a framework for the story, but it was a very loose one, and I ended up just letting the details develop as I went along, without trying to force it any which way beyond the very basic idea. So there's some mooing involved, indeed.
The setting was very much inspired by Dante's Inferno, which I put a personal twist onto, and I mixed and matched the motifs from there with various images that just made sense in my head that all best reflected the story that wanted to come out.
Some of the imagery had a very accidental origin. For example, I had this stylized flower I always used to draw in Procreate by using some of the basic brushes, and I realised it looked an awful lot like a poppy. I did look up the symbolism of the flower and found it very fitting, so it just organically clicked.
The park with the cherub statue is a real one. And I did indeed often use to find myself carrying over coffee cups from a nearby café and sitting on the benches next to the pond with someone. The cherub statue is a somewhat of a fiction, and your interpretation basically correct, albeit with somewhat sharper contours and more concrete meaning for me, but that's only natural.
Again, I thank you so much for your words! It really does inspire me to keep at this. For now, this is just something I do when I get some time off, but I do have ideas and plans to incorporate it into my professional life, so it definitely gives me some much needed confirmation that my thinking is on the right track!