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Portrait painting practice.

Lalapril Day Eleven- Muse

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This was how the level 90 quests in Dawntrail went, right?

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Wuk Lamat but she's tabasqueña! / 01-25

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I left my heart in Ishgard ~

My dearest friend, in whom I trust without hesitation, without doubt─ Come what may, I know you will strive on.

-Haurchefant Greystone

It's what I am, and I'm not ashamed of it.

-Hilda Ware

We whom gods and men have forsaken shall be the instruments of our own deliverance.

-Ysayle Dangoulain

No matter how deep our grief, we will rise again.

-Estinien Varlineau

If it is folly to hope, I am content to die a fool.

-Aymeric de Borel

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A hibiscus flower under ultraviolet light, shining for the polinators.

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Titania

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Giving Saffron a break from the horrors :) nothing like a lil girls date to really ease the heart heh

Tapas: https://tapas.io/episode/3584860

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I like to reference and take cues from various musicians from the era when it comes to posing and dressing Dancing Green but really wanted to push myself to find Indigenous artists to honor the Shetona who are inspired by Native Americans irl. While looking I found this great Documentary called “Rumble the Indians who Rocked the World”. [X] That goes into depth about how much Native people have inspired and gave to American music, yet are often left out of the conversation and the artist’s indigenous identities are often ignored. It’s only $4 to rent on YouTube and I highly recommend the watch!

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MESSAGE TO ALL OF MY CHILDREN: please survive

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Forget me not and look upon me, for I am the sacrificial lamb from which your future shall be carved.

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New art for the FFXIV oracle deck. I'm trying to add variety to this deck's aesthetic with color and black and white images. The upper center is the universal card back for the whole thing. Definitely take a moment to follow the Kickstarter if you're interested in a physical copy of this thing. I'll launch it as soon as there's a decent following.

[GET A PHYSICAL COPY OF THIS ORACLE DECK]

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God I am hoping we go to Meracydia soon, I want More.

I've done a lot of grumbling about the difficulties of incorporating the Warring Triad into this fic because it's so siloed in canon but after replaying it on New Game + I truly don't regret the effort because it's just such a good questline and it really meshes well with the patch MSQ. I can appreciate the value of incorporating trials into MSQ rather than making them side content, especially given how much the latter limits possible follow-up. Nonetheless... Warring Triad, my beloved. It's such a great story.

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Hroth Charr sprint

Replaces the forward sprint animation, available for masc and fem Hrothgar!

Heliosphere

(extra WIPs under the cut):

I had been wanting more feral Hrothgar since they were announced... and fell down a rabbithole figuring out animation rigging and such, the biggest thing that made me go "this might be possible" is learning Inverse Kinematics constraints, so from there I took a look at the vanilla Hrothgar M sprint to see if I could modify it to follow the Charr (Guild Wars 2) sprint!

I keyframed most of the movement based on this reference:

without the digitigrade legs and the pronounced, long shoulder bones though, it doesn't quite match up all the way, but I think it looks alright. I might go back to fix some things (notably skirt movement and there's a slight jitter part way), but right now... that's really the first time I've finished an animation cycle, and I'm really proud of how it looks!

here's a bonus gif of Vahris with the run. It's really cool how similar they look to that Charr haha

and here's Vira with it! (Femhroth are super leggy in comparison)

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I understand why people see venats “no more shall man have wings to bear him to paradise. henceforth, he shall walk.” as a #hardship breeds character #ease is bad statement but to me in the context of endwalker and in the context of Hermes’ whole deal it was more to me a “you are so fixated on heaven you think earth is a misery. I’m overturning the fast lane you are trying to pave to heaven. Everyone is taking the scenic route”

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My very silly FFXIV house decorating project is halfway done! What I've done is filled every other character slot on my main character's server, had them join my FC, progressed them far enough to unlock housing, and now I'm using all their private rooms at the FC to expand the FC house's footprint instead of treating them as "personal" spaces.

Like the FC is a casual little seaside bar and grill kind of establishment, and one of the character's rooms is the manager's office, the other is the storage room, etc. Except that the restaurant is actually just a front for a sky pirate base, so you find yourself wondering why the storage room also has a massive treasure vault in the back, or why they've got a sparring ring with a bunch of visibly cursed swords mounted on the walls.

I'm not doing anything particularly novel or tricky with my builds, no glitching or floating or anything, just using items more or less in the most straightforward manner, but I'm still having fun with the concept. I'm probably going to redesign the main FC house when I'm done though, as I've become dissatisfied with its layout. Fortunately the rest of the FC members are pretty content to just let this be my personal playground.

Current progress pics under the cut:

First of all, here's the house. The restaurant is called Mogaritaville, because I can't stop myself, but I've got major plans for redesign. I'm not happy with how sparse the arcade upstairs feels, despite having every playable minigame from the Gold Saucer present. They're all so bulky and obnoxious to fit in, but I've got ideas for how to do it. Meanwhile the basement was a riff on the sort of "backstage space" feel of the San Antonio Riverwalk, a very charming shopping and restaurant area that I used to visit annually when I was in town for PAX South back in the day. It looks all right in the picture, but it doesn't feel like a space anyone's characters would ever use, so I'm ditching it. The restaurant on the ground floor will be mostly getting some touches to make it feel like more of a grungy, dangerous place, like a run-down Chuck E Cheez where you're pretty sure all the staff are dealing drugs in the parking lot.

And then here's the Captain's Ready Room. Captain Siege Zabac is my main character, my canon Warrior of Light, and not at all above using his connection to the Scions and status as a world-renowned hero to bully the Yellowjackets into looking the other way when he and his friends engage in a little light piracy of non-approved targets in between missions (he mostly hits Syndicate ships, Siege fully intends to pry Lolorito's head off with his bare hands some day).

The idea with the Ready Room was the kind of place where you'd see a gang of thieves getting together to talk about the next heist, where someone might stab a knife into a map. A lot of inspiration was taken from Leofard's room in the Parrock, and also from the Void Ark raids overall since the whole crew wears the Sky Pirates title and Redbills Bandana proudly.

Next up is the Galley. If anyone asks why the restaurant seems to have a second smaller restaurant, they're told that it's the VIP lounge and that whoever they are don't qualify as VIPs. The actual situation is that sometimes the Amaranthine Maw Pirates want to get a bite to eat or a few drinks without having to subject themselves to the general public out in the Mogaritaville dining room. Thus, VIPs really means "members of the crew, or very close friends only."

The Galley is the domain of First Mate R'khsana Jannat, who is the beloved granddaughter of Siege's predecessor as captain of the Amaranthine Maw Pirates, and who is frankly a better sailor than anyone else on the crew... but she's only like 22, so she needs a few more years before she's ready to take full command.

Third in the lineup is the Hold, which should just be a storage room full of restaurant supplies, but also has a gigantic and well-defended treasure vault. And the pool table is just there to encourage crew members to hang out here between duties and add an extra layer of security.

The Hold belongs to Quartermaster Griever Strzygasch, third in command and Siege's oldest friend, who met the captain when Siege was fleeing from conscription in the Garlean 7th Legion and Griever was a smuggler working with the Bozjan Resistance. The two of them have worked together on and off under several commanders, and when Siege finally acquired his own ship he recruited Griever to keep it stocked and repaired, and to make sure all the plunder was properly accounted for and hidden away.

The last one that I've completed is the Armory, which is equal parts trophy room and dojo. A proper Sky Pirate crew would accumulate a lot of cursed weapons among their plunder, even if they weren't the combat support team for the Warrior of Light, and this is where they store all the most dangerous stuff, and also come to train how to fight with it.

The Armory is managed by Master-at-Arms Auberont Gevaudan, a Duskwight who claims to be a scion of the now-defunct Gelmorran royal family, and who has devoted considerable effort to developing the iron-hard discipline to control a shadowy "inner beast" that he says is his only real inheritance from that bloodline. He's basically if Gambit from the X-Men was an Elf Werewolf, and out of the Amaranthine Maw Pirates he's the only one who can keep his win/loss ratio sparring with the Captain roughly even... which means, in any other context, that he is absurdly dangerous.

There are four more pirates to go, but it'll be a while because I still need to catch two of them up to my leveling goal before working on their rooms. Right now everyone who's got a room is at the first quest of 4.1, right after defeating Shinryu. Except Siege obviously, who's finished the whole MSQ.

Chaplain Penitent Cormorant is a Hellsguard mage and the ship's official supernatural phenomenon wrangler, and also the Captain's ex-wife. Think of how superstitious sailors are in real life, and then imagine if ghosts and sea monsters and crap were all very provably real - that's why the ship needs a dedicated sorceress on board. Her room is going to be the Sanctum, a library and enchantment lab, but some of the pieces are going to be very expensive so it may take a while.

Engineer Lockpix Burglebanks may be the heir to a fortune in Ul'dah large enough to put him on the Syndicate if he ever claimed it, but he prefers to spend his time with the crew of goblin bank robbers who adopted him as an infant, after his parents were killed in an Amalj'aa raid. He is technically Siege's ward as part of his parole conditions, and everyone looks the other way over the fact that he's now engaged in a whole new tier of crime. His room will be the Garage, the crafting space where upgrades to the Skyship Mako are constructed.

Navigator Usul Haragin is weird even for a Haragin, and the Haragin clan are weird even for Xaela Au Ra. One day he just got up and built a raft, sailed across half the star, and tracked down Captain Zabac in person informing him that Usul had seen in a vision that he was meant to walk by this warrior's side. His space will be the Baths, a combination shower/locker rooms and actual hot tubs. Normally I wouldn't have the floor space to devote to character hygiene, but with 8 rooms to build out I couldn't go without providing somewhere for these pirates to get less stinky.

And finally Surgeon Kaja Jarnvidr is technically a civilian contractor rather than a full crew member, but as the Ship's Doctor she has been given the authority to take anyone out of action, so everyone tries to stay on her good side. She's almost 400 years old, and has exactly zero patience left for other people's bullshit. Her room will be the Infirmary, including a private study, a surgery suite, and beds for the particularly badly injured to recover.

If you'd like to take a look at any of this up close, this is all on Aether Data Center, Sargatanas Server, Mist, Ward 6, Plot 60.

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Under the auspices of Make a terrible comic day, I decided to see if I could speedrun the wolchefant comic i thumbnailed approximately a million years ago and i kind of did it? I'd still like to finish it properly, but you can see my vision :)

I rendered this one panel of the thumbnails back in 2022, so I'm glad to finally get it in a coherent form at least.

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The twins in each expansion. I needed to make a reference sheet to keep my brain straight.

They grow up so fast 🥹