This one was a big turning point for me. Sometime in 2018, a friend lent me his copy of Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia. I absolutely adored the character portraits in that game (drawn by an illustrator named Hidari, whose work I highly recommend looking up if you're unfamiliar), so I tried to draw Vae in that style, and I was really surprised by the result. In hindsight I don't think I actually got that close to the style I was trying to imitate, but I was super pleased with it at the time, and it hadn't been nearly as daunting a task as it'd seemed. I had no idea I was capable of making something that looked like this at the time. I felt like I'd just leveled up.
I incorporated a lot of the things I learned while drawing this into my future drawings, and my art style changed pretty dramatically afterwards as a result. You can kind of see it looking at the 2018 gallery page, actually -- everything that I drew after this looks so different than everything that came before it, it almost looks like it was drawn by a different person. I started rendering skin and hair in much greater detail, and started using soft shading and highlights instead of the hard, flat, cel-shaded look I used to go for. Anyway, shout out to my friend who lent me that game. My art would not look the way it does today if you hadn't done that.