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Description
To paraphrase an acquaintance on Discord when I first made this character, "Au Ra dorable."

No, Final Fantasy XIV is *not* why I've been avoiding posting art all year until now, shut up.

I've been dealing with a lot of issues this year regarding family finances and whatnot. Thankfully my friends - you know who you are - have been giving us a boost and we're eternally grateful for your help. It's thanks to you that we're not starving.

There's also the fact that my worries about AI killed my creative drive for quite a while. I swear, evangelists for large language models sound so much like NFTechbros, I've had to check my calendar every so often to make sure it's not still 2021.

But at this point, I'm getting old and I'm increasingly deciding to embrace my inner "Fuggit, we ball." I didn't get into art to compare myself to other means of image generation, be they actual sapient artists or plagiarist machines. I got into it because weird and beautiful ideas occasionally lodge themselves into my diseased brain, and it's more practical for me to put those ideas to paper myself than pay someone else to do it. (Not that I'm above commissioning someone else once in a while. I can, I have, I may in the future.)

Hence my XIV OC jumping out of The Source and into my whimsical toon world... Does that count as isekai? >.>

~Az

EDIT (9/25/2023): Added and cleaned up some details here and there, fixed some shading mistakes, most notably her right elbow and forearm which looked rotated strangely.

Description
To paraphrase an acquaintance on Discord when I first made this character, "Au Ra dorable."

No, Final Fantasy XIV is *not* why I've been avoiding posting art all year until now, shut up.

I've been dealing with a lot of issues this year regarding family finances and whatnot. Thankfully my friends - you know who you are - have been giving us a boost and we're eternally grateful for your help. It's thanks to you that we're not starving.

There's also the fact that my worries about AI killed my creative drive for quite a while. I swear, evangelists for large language models sound so much like NFTechbros, I've had to check my calendar every so often to make sure it's not still 2021.

But at this point, I'm getting old and I'm increasingly deciding to embrace my inner "Fuggit, we ball." I didn't get into art to compare myself to other means of image generation, be they actual sapient artists or plagiarist machines. I got into it because weird and beautiful ideas occasionally lodge themselves into my diseased brain, and it's more practical for me to put those ideas to paper myself than pay someone else to do it. (Not that I'm above commissioning someone else once in a while. I can, I have, I may in the future.)

Hence my XIV OC jumping out of The Source and into my whimsical toon world... Does that count as isekai? >.>

~Az

EDIT (9/25/2023): Added and cleaned up some details here and there, fixed some shading mistakes, most notably her right elbow and forearm which looked rotated strangely.