Maud MIW
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?
One of my friends talked a few of us into starting the game a few months before Endwalker came out, and I got addicted very quickly! I’ve played other Final Fantasy games, and had seen several people I follow playing the game and it looked so fun! I really loved both the characters, and the job classes (I’m a Machinist main, but also play Pictomancer a lot too!), not to mention the massive amount of stuff you can do.
I loved the characters so much that I ended up drawing them! The first thing I made was 2 different sticker sheets featuring minions, as I got into collecting them very early on. Once I find something I really enjoy, I inevitably will draw art for it as soon as possible! I also love to make stuff that I personally want to own, and there was plenty of stuff in FFXIV that I wanted to own for myself, especially a tarot deck!
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?
I have a few things that I really love making art of, and all work into what I make for XIV! I love making art of women and femmes, and many of my favorite characters in the series are women (I have so much art of Ryne, my favorite girl). I love presenting women in a strong way! I’m also a fan of playing with both color, and different styles. I always love doing cel-shaded art, with a more flat 2D style, but I’ve begun experimenting more with shading lately. I hope that people see how much I love drawing women, and enjoy seeing women and femmes drawn in such a strong way! I also want to inspire people to create the things they want to see in the world, you don’t always have to create for what others want, make things YOU love sometimes too!
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?
One of my favorite things that I’m very proud of is my drawing of Tsukuyomi! She’s got such amazing character design, and I had a lot of fun playing with the shading detail work. Doing so much filigree on all the gold took hours, and I was so happy with how it came out! I actually worked on this while on a trip through Italy, so much of it was drawn while on the train or during down time. I loved how vibrant the colors came out.
I’m also proud of my tarot deck! It took a long time, and I remade several cards about a year ago, as I wanted to include new characters. Coming up with design elements, and creating the card box design, was something I was very proud of. Designing for 3D elements (like the box) is challenging for me sometimes, so I was glad it came out well!
What is a future project you hope to pursue, whether in fandom spaces or in your personal work?
I hope to keep making more tarot! I’d love to make my own full deck someday, as I usually only do the major arcana. I’m currently working on an original characters Magical Girls deck (the major arcana is already done and in my shop!), but drawing that many cards takes a long time. I’m trying to do more original art, so that also works with that goal! For XIV, I want to keep adding to my collection of raid boss keychain charms! I did a few from the Myths of the Realms series, and I also have a few from Arcadian, and will be adding more as we get more bosses! I’m also adding in some of the older summons and bosses that I enjoy (Tsukuyomi and Feo Ul), so there will hopefully be more in the future! I also started a series of buttons that look like the FFXIV characters are in a little bubble, and I’m going to continue adding new characters to it!
Matching FFXIV’s colorful characters to the major arcana for your XIV tarot set was, I imagine, a lot of fun. Were there any characters you wish you could have included in the set, or a card that you were particularly torn between two characters for?
Oh there were SO many! Someday I might make a full deck with the minor arcana, because there’s just so many good characters I wanted to include! The current one is the second version actually, since I wanted to include some new characters and move a few around. I thought a lot about the best characters for each card, and definitely changed my mind several times! The hardest one was the Lovers card, as there are SO many good options for couples in the game, though many are more fan ships. Originally I had Shiva and Hraesvelgr, as they felt like the best representation, but in terms of art, it was difficult to effectively present them. I ended up changing it to Ryne and Gaia, as their relationship as the oracles of light and dark make a lot of sense for the Lovers card. I also decided to add Wuk Lamat as the Sun card, as she is one of my favorite characters in Dawntrail!
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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 started playing FFXIV in October 2019 (almost 6 years ago, depending when this interview comes out—it’ll be my XIV birthday on the 30th of October!). I’d been sort of interested in it for a while, as a few artists whose work I enjoyed had gotten into the game and with Shadowbringers having just come out, I’d seen some really gorgeous fanworks popping up, which is what usually entices me into new media. I ended up downloading it one day while I was off sick from work with the flu. I enjoyed the early parts of the game, though it didn’t quite hook me immediately… but a few months later, a certain global pandemic began, and a few thousand hours later, here we are. I’ve been in a lot of fandoms in my life, but XIV is by far the one that’s had the strongest grip on me. I could ramble all day about why I love it, but I’ll just say that the characters and narrative are my favourite of any game, ever. I’m also way into making up a guy, and XIV is one of those fandoms where that’s particularly celebrated (maybe even the most celebrated? I can’t think of another fandom that loves its fan characters as much as XIV players love WoLs).
I’ve been sharing my art online for most of my life at this point (I was a deviantART 13-year-old), but XIV was one of the first fandoms I started making merch for, in 2024. In late 2023 I quit my job as an artist at a video game studio, due to hating it, and I then began freelancing instead, and on a whim I booked a half-table at a local convention just to see if it was something I liked doing and if it might be a viable extra way of bringing in money. It turned out to be both of those things! Now I table at a number of conventions every year, and also sell my work through my online shop. I’m very grateful to be able to do this as part of my job—making fanworks sometimes feels almost like a guilty pleasure, so the fact that it now helps to pay my bills is a little wild to me.
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?
I don’t think this comes across much in my work, but I am and always have been a little emo guy, and the reason I am that is because I’m particularly drawn to art that is especially expressive and raw and rough around the edges, that eschews polish in favour of just getting it out there, so when there’s a nasally man screaming in my ear about how he feels like he’ll never be loved again, well I like that very much. I’m far too meticulous to let my own art be as messy as I’d like it to be (I hope to fix this someday), but that focus on the emotional core of a piece is something I keep centred, and that emotion will usually be what I also want to inspire in the viewer. I have many strong feelings about Emet-Selch and I would like you to have them too.
Other than that, I’m a bit of a maximalist and I love making elaborate compositions. My favourite merch items to make are A3 prints for that reason—having tons of room to squeeze in lots of details and things like ornate borders delights me.
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?
That would have to be the big “Warrior of Light” illustration that I completed in January this year! It features a deliberately vague Warrior of Light, riding their chocobo across a landscape made up of locations from every expansion (minus Dawntrail—I’d envisioned it as a tribute to the Hydaelyn/Zodiark era) and a border made up of prominent enemies and allies. I believe I popped off with this one? When I look at it now, I think “wow, how on earth did I have the patience to finish this” (the answer to this is that I worked on it over Christmas, so I was mostly on the couch, eating various vegan cheeses and painting away without one single care in the world).
I’m very pleased that as well as being my own personal favourite illustration of mine, it’s also been one of my most generally well-received pieces of work, both in terms of the response on social media as well as in print sales. I tried to really pour all the love I have for this game into this illustration, and it’s touching to see that that has resonated with others who hold XIV dear. The number of people who have threatened physical violence against me (affectionately) in the Tumblr tags brings me a great deal of joy.
What is a future project you hope to pursue, whether in fandom spaces or in your personal work?
There’s a little beast that lives in my mind that is constantly telling me I should get into making comics. Recently I’ve started listening to it, so I’m currently in the very early stages of, well… planning a comic. It’s an original work and I have no idea when I’ll have time to make it, but hopefully at some point in my lifetime it will become real.
I’m also planning on getting a membership for my local print studio soon! I’m very excited to get to experiment with new printmaking processes, especially screenprinting and risograph, and screenprinting in particular may well manifest into some fun new merch.
Your love of folklore clearly influences your original works, but how does it more (or perhaps less) subtly affect how you approach creating fan art illustrations?
I think that to answer that, I have to explain what it is I love about folklore. I love storytelling. I love that a lot of folklore plays with this idea of the “other” and the ways it briefly touches our world, whether it’s fairies, or spirits, or like what if you saw a suspiciously large black dog. I love that it adds magic to the mundane. I love that it’s a constant, quiet presence—I can walk down the street in my city and see statues of dragons from local folk tales. I love that folklore is owned by the people, and that it’s kept alive by people sharing it just because they want to, whether it’s to preserve it or just for the love of storytelling.
As for how all of that influences the way I approach making fanart… I sort of see fandoms as kind of contemporary little spheres of folklore, in that they’re their own subcultures and they have their own tales and customs shared amongst fans, typically relating to whatever media they’re formed around (I have some thoughts re; the capitalist nature of most of that media that prevent me from just straight up calling fandoms folklore, but I won’t get into that here). So, I view creating fanworks as contributing to a culture, as well as celebrating, exploring, and even expanding on the original story that the fandom is based around. When I make fanart, I want it to become part of the shared tapestry of that fandom, which maybe sounds a little grandiose, but there are fanworks from fandoms I haven’t been active in for years that I still think about often, and I’d like for my work to have that same impact.
On a less abstract level, my fondness for the storytelling aspect of folklore is something that I think bleeds into my illustration work often. When I’m planning a piece, I’m always thinking about what sort of narrative I’m trying to communicate in it, even if it’s just a very loose idea of one. I’m also very into relics and items with special symbolism, so these often wind their way into my compositions too—I like working as much meaning into my art as I can.
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