Riley Hairvolution

This is kind of fascinating to me, so I thought I'd share it.

Riley's been around for awhile. She appears near the beginning of my first ever God Slayers sketchbook, but she was without her little hair... thing, which, for me at least, has become a rather iconic part of her appearance.

Looking back through my old sketchbooks, I was really curious how it came to be... and the journey of just how her crazy hairdo changed through the years is long and strange. Rather than take crappy photos of even crappier sketches, I decided to make this mockup real quick to sorta summarize it. The rest of her appearance has morphed as my art has improved, but honestly there's very little else about her that changed even from her earliest sketch. She has always been a little greasy cute stripey crazy kitty.

It was the goggles, initially, that gave me the idea her hair would be jutting out all over the place. When not in use, I imagined she just kinda carelessly pushed them up on her head with little regard for how they sat. Combined with a lot of grease and a bit of fire, her hair would be a mess, pretty much all the time. After a fair few sketches, the hair in the middle started to get longer and curlier, while the hair to the sides kinda turned into smaller spikes. She lost her ponytail somewhere in the middle there too, but it came back in 2020 when I got closer to actually bringing her to light in Chapter 5. Then she got stuck with this little curled hook thing for a long time, until about June when it started to become square.

Now it's this giant, dominating, defining feature by which we could probably identify the character even if it was the only part visible. It might even be a little TOO big, honestly, the way I draw it now. I dunno! Lemme know what you think!