Vimimi
Tell me a bit about your history playing XIV! What pulled you in, and what inspired you to start creating art and merch for it?
I originally tried the game around patch 2.2, but due to a bunch of factors, I stopped soon after and didn’t come back and stick around until around 3.1. It was specifically the first Ifrit fight that was the moment I said to myself, “Okay, I’ll buy the full game and pay for the subscription,” and I haven’t stopped playing since. Now, I do pretty much everything the game has, from raiding to crafting to chocobo racing and more. I even learned mahjong because of XIV!
The funny thing about the art side is that my first piece of fanart for the game was some simple sketches based on the 1.0 pre-release images. After I started playing myself, making art for XIV just was a kind of obvious next step for me in being a fan of something. Merch is a much more recent development though. I’ve gotten to a point where I feel more confident with my art, especially following opening commissions, so I wanted to put my own art on physical objects and even try tackling Artist Alleys like I wanted to back when I was much younger.
How does your personal creative outlook or style influence the merchandise and art you create (XIV or otherwise)? What do you hope people take away or feel from your work?
In all honesty, it’s almost embarrassingly simple. I like cute and round things, so I draw cute and round things. Bright, colorful, and happy media (such as Mahou Shoujo) are ones I gravitate towards because I want to have that sort of bright and cheery atmosphere. Thus, I make art that feels similar to what I myself like. I suppose I hope others can get a sense of bright and cheery vibes from my work as well!
Is there a piece of art you’ve created that you are especially proud of – for example, a piece that pushed or “leveled up” your skills, or one that was particularly popular, or perhaps something that came out exactly as you had imagined it?
I’m particularly fond of my recent thumbnail pieces for my raid videos, particularly M2S and M3S, when it comes to static art pieces. I had a lot of fun drawing them as well. There’s also a piece I did for the 2023 Starlight Celebration that I really like as well. The minions surrounding the bottom part of the frame are really cute.
When it comes to animation though, it’s tough to pick a specific one. The “Bee My Honey” MV was a major challenge in being my first time doing a full MV. I wanted it to feel like the old “World is Mine” MV and felt I was able to nail it. It also went incredibly viral as well. There’s also the PokéDance parody animation I did for Spofie, which had the challenge of being a dance animation. While it wasn’t a super complicated dance, it definitely was a piece that took a lot but I’m ultimately happy how it turned out and (when my time allows it) wouldn’t mind doing another dance animation like it in the future.
What is a future project you hope to pursue, whether in fandom spaces or in your personal work?
I’d love to have more Vtuber “children,” haha. I’ve made my own model and am even working on more outfits right now, but it’d be fun to work on a completely different character as a Live2D model. I’ve done a few “controller gremlin” models so far and those have been a lot of fun. Also, I’d like to do another cover/remix and animation like the one I did for “Give It All × It’s Showtime!”, though I’d have to find the right spark of a song to do it for.
Your FFXIV shorts “Daily Eorzea Life” are relatively new compared to how long you have been drawing and streaming. What inspired you to start making humorous shorts chronicling the often silly and sometimes frustrating parts of playing FFXIV that many other players can relate to? Has creating them allowed you to explore a style of art and editing that is outside your usual work?
The first short animation I did with a similar idea was for Spofie, following a comment she made on stream for an idea and I thought it was too funny to not make real. We did other animation projects together, but I also had some ideas of my own based on my experiences that I wanted to do so I started working on those independently. After that, the shorts became a weekly thing which kept me drawing regularly and giving me different animation challenges depending on my idea for the week. The fact they’re on a weekly basis helps keep the animation loose and stops me from trying to make every frame perfect, which I think is a good thing in this type of project. I definitely work fast for an artist, but it’s also relaxing to be able to just go with whatever comes to mind and not feel the need to refine it as much as I might for a still piece. If anything, these have practically become my “usual work” now, haha.
Follow Vimimi and check out their shop!
Vgen Shop
Carrd
Bsky
Sanglunaria
Tell me a bit about your history playing XIV! What pulled you in, and what inspired you to start creating art and merch for it?
Fat chocobos.
Well, that’s the short version of the story, anyway.
The long version starts with the fact that the pool of video games I can play is actually very limited because I have an especially sensitive case of simulator sickness (a subset of motion sickness that is caused by video games). For most people, it’s caused by FPS’s, but for me, even most third-person perspective games end up making me want to violently chuck my cookies. I had always longed to play more video games with my husband, so when he decided to get back into WoW and showed me that it can be played while very zoomed out, I decided to try out the free trial.
Meanwhile, one of my best friends (who had been playing FFXIV for a few years and was very passionate about it) kept sending me pictures of various things from FFXIV that he thought I might like. When he sent me pictures of the fat chocobo mount and the heavy hatchling minion, I immediately fell in love with how cute and bouncy they were. (When you consider the fact that the only minion-equivalent I had found in WoW at that point was a literal maggot, it’s not hard to see why I was so enamored with FFXIV’s minions!) Once he showed me that FFXIV could also be played from a very zoomed-out, almost-aerial perspective, it was all over for WoW. (I suppose this is also the story of how I went from playing a grungy Forsaken to a cute lalafell.)
The aspect of FFXIV that really stood out to me and inspired me to start drawing fan art of it was how detailed and gorgeous the game looked, everything from the architecture in towns and cities to gear and weapon designs. I believe WoW has since also gone through a large-scale graphics overhaul, but when I first tried both MMOs back in 2019, the graphics in FFXIV were vastly better looking. (One should also bear in mind that I didn’t have very many other games to compare graphics and visuals to, due to my rampant simulator sickness.)
How does your personal creative outlook or style influence the merchandise and art you create (XIV or otherwise)? What do you hope people take away or feel from your work?
As alluded to in my answer to the previous question, I just really enjoy admiring the designs of and little details of practically everything. I am also fascinated by the ability of video games to whisk us away into different worlds. I combine these two principles when I brainstorm merchandise ideas. I like making things that allow people to incorporate a little bit of the world of FFXIV into their daily lives, and if looking at or using said merchandise reminds them of their time spent in Eorzea (and beyond), that’s even better. Sort of like souvenirs that people buy while they’re on vacation, if you will.
Is there a piece of art you’ve created that you are especially proud of – for example, a piece that pushed or “leveled up” your skills, or one that was particularly popular, or perhaps something that came out exactly as you had imagined it?
Definitely my jobstone shaker charms. The project was such a huge undertaking and took me over three years to complete. I was disappointed that the jobstones play such an integral role in FFXIV, but did not have hi-res official images (the only official images I could ever find were the tiny 128×128 pixel ones from Lodestone). I really wanted some hi-res artwork of the jobstones to stare at (who doesn’t like staring at shiny rocks??), so I decided to do it myself.
I value accuracy very deeply, so each jobstone required hours and hours of studying the tiny Lodestone images and comparing them to in-game screenshots (you know, from the two seconds you see your WoL holding the jobstones during job quest cutscenes). The other part of the project that was especially challenging was picking out appropriate subjects for the shakable parts of each charm. I wanted to avoid just copying job action icons or job gauges as much as possible; I wanted them to be things that were intrinsic to each job and their associated job quests. That meant I had to play and level each job as much as possible so I could get a good feel for each one. At the end of the day, I probably put way too much effort into the project, but I’m still very proud of and pleased with the end product.
What is a future project you hope to pursue, whether in fandom spaces or in your personal work?
With regards to FFXIV, I really want to draw more character art. Drawing people is definitely my weak spot and I actively avoid it because I am rarely satisfied with the outcome. I keep hoping that the passion that other artists in the fandom have for their WoLs and favorite characters will become infectious and encourage me to make the jump into drawing more character art. Although I do adore my WoL very much and would die for her, I very rarely draw her!
Outside of FFXIV, Pokemon is definitely my biggest muse and lifelong love. I drew a few ghost Pokemon-themed tarot cards a while back, and unfailingly, at every convention I table at, I get tons of people inquiring about a full deck. So I am working on that now! I am currently in the process of studying the meaning of each tarot card and comparing it to Pokedex entries of Ghost-type Pokemon so I can select a good match for each card’s illustration.
Some of your work features designs that do not include immediately recognizable characters, but rather evoke recognizable places—your motel tag charms for The Roost Inn, the Pendants, and Bokairo Inn in FFXIV, for example. Do these sorts of designs provide a unique challenge for you, or allow you to explore a different kind of design than you would with your character-focused art?
I’m chuckling a bit because I think I sort of already accidentally answered this question. Non-humanoid subjects, objects, and general design or aesthetics definitely come to me more naturally than character art. However, they can still be fairly challenging from a time and research perspective because I’m such a stickler for detail and accuracy. I like to joke that the gpose folder on my PC is 99% reference images and 1% WoL-related because of how much time I spend taking reference screenshots of buildings, special effects from job actions, and random items.
For example, getting adequate references for my Red Mage Vermillion Scourge coaster was very time-consuming because of the nature of the LB3. The LB3 takes up a huge area, so it took a lot of hopping into different dungeons in explorer mode to find one that had a large enough empty area to fit the entire LB3. Additionally, as we all know, you can barely see the LB3 because of how bright it is, so it took many attempts at capturing the LB3 at just the right moment before the infamous flashbang went off.
Inquiries of Art 
Leave a comment