At some point in my artistic development, I think I must have missed a turn where other people learned to create art fast. I spend an inordinate amount of time on my most highly polished pictures and for a period of about 5 years, I think this really hamstrung my improvement as I'd only be completing a few pictures a year. I think this was what caused me to pull back from art in general.

Last year, circumstances afforded me significantly more free time and I really threw myself back into doing art with a vengeance. I did Inktober for the first time and tried to work on facial expressions, something I was historically less confident with. Applying what I learned from that, I made this and the other version in about an afternoon. It's not perfect up close, but I think it stands up pretty well at a distance. :)

One of my favourite things about anthro characters is the fact that I can give them awesome, badass teeth and claws and such. Rats have a pretty uniquely terrifying dental profile with the two huge, chisel-shaped incisors top and bottom. Like their quadrupedal cousins, Azira and his species' teeth grow continuously throughout their lifetimes and they have to gnaw on things to keep them down or it gets quite uncomfortable. Kutrahl bite force is proportionally scaled up with size from normal rats and Azira's teeth would make very short work of a wooden 2x4 and given enough time, he could quite capably chew through an iron chain.