The Phantom Inker

This is the Sorceress Ashani, who lives in an Empire in a far-off D&D reality that's a bit like China. She looks young, but when she was an eighteen-year-old human girl studying magic at the Academy, another student, jealous of her talents, cast a forbidden magic spell on her, cursing her to be a monster for a thousand years.

...that was three hundred years ago, and she doesn't look a day older.

Ashani wanders the Empire now, the famed powerful centaur sorceress, helping those in need, using her magic wisely, traveling from village to village and town to town, seeking her true purpose in the world.

Alternatively, this is a drawing I've been working on for the last eight months, and I hope it shows.

The background has a bit of a story attached to it, which is that originally I didn't want to draw the background, but I kind of knew what I wanted, so I sketched out rough colors and shapes to try to describe what I wanted, and I then fed my sketch into an AI. Whereupon I made the AI draw fifty backgrounds or so based on my sketches, each resulting background not really what I wanted no matter what I told it. I smashed together bits and pieces of a few of the best ones, trying to make a better background, and the result was sort of okay and I used it as a background layer for a while while I was shading her. But I never really liked the AI's work: It wasn't really what I wanted. So finally today I spent like six hours hand-drawing the background I wanted, heavily referencing chunks of a dozen or so of the AI's landscapes that I liked the most. The AI helped inspire me to get the background right, but ultimately I didn't directly use any of the AI's work because the AI just wouldn't do what I wanted.

Either way, the setting is designed to look vaguely similar to Yangshuo, China. And the flower is a pink hibiscus. And her outfit is vaguely similar to a kimono but, as @RelicRaider rightly pointed out on my livestream today, it's not exactly a kimono. I looked at lots of pictures of kimonos before I arrived at this design (which is loosely secured in the back, in case you're wondering). So it's all very Asian, and if you want to believe instead that it's China and she's Asian, you're welcome to believe that, but it's still a D&D world that just happens to be very similar ;)

In total this is, I dunno, fifty, sixty hours of work, all drawn in CorelDRAW with a mouse, 100% vector art from top to bottom.

A high-resolution copy of this image can be found in my Patreon, along with other older versions as I was working on it.

And egad! Sorceress Ashani has ensorcelled her own picture! It seems that the rogue sorceress has hidden eight magical luck charms in it; can you find them all?