Riot Nrrd

Since I spent all my time on my computer yesterday wrestling with a virus, today in lieu of a comic, I'm posting some of the earliest sketches of Riot Nrrd. They were done in a free program called GIMP, and they're a little horrendous. Appropriately, I pulled them together on my partner's computer, and I type this through paint.

This is probably the first thing I ever drew on my tablet. Sam was originally a redhead. I also planned on her wearing these chunky beads all the time.

Somewhere in the margins of my college notebooks, I have the very first sketch of Maria, which looks nothing like this. She had long, straight hair and was much more stylish and feminine. But I felt like it leaned too much on images of trans women we already see. I thought, her best friend Wren is a tomboy, why shouldn't Maria get to be butch sometimes too? I started thinking of her as "sporty", but now she's pretty much the character I dress like myself.

Wren's hair is hard to draw at a lot of angles, but it's probably the only hairstyle in the comic that's guaranteed not to change. It was one of the first things I envisioned about any of the characters - Wren in general has changed the least since the beginning.

Maria has probably changed the most - her hair and clothes have gone through a few re-designs, but I also changed her eyes (they're almost bizarrely anime-ish here) and the shape of her head as I went along (to distinguish her silouhette from Wren's).