From time to time, I revisit the design of one of my OC's to see if I can make improvements in the character model. Oftentimes the motivation is an upcoming project using that particular character in multiple instances. Other times an idea pops into my head for a design change that would upgrade the appearance of a character I've been drawing for years, without fundamentally altering their looks to the point they become unrecognizable.

For this collection of headshots, I am practicing three design changes for Roland here. The first is his ear placement. As I mentioned in January 2020 Headsketches, I had been wrestling with a method of improving the placement of Roland's ears. Their original design, and one I was satisfied with for well over 30 years, had the ears at the sides of his head rather than the upper quadrants of the skull like a real cat. Some time ago I figured out that what was complicating that effort was that I was drawing his ears too close to the front of his head. By pushing them back to the rear and enlarging them to compensate for being partly obscured by his head-hair, I think I achieved an improvement in their appearance without making him too similar to Todd.

The second change, one that I'm still tinkering with, is his head-hair. When I first created this character back in the mid 1980's, he had none. At an unspecified point in history, I added what amounted to a short afro shaped into a flat-topped fade. Within the past year or so (starting with Nuttin for Christmas, I started experimenting with changing this to what's evolving toward an unruly messy-ish Boondocks-style afro, without being terribly obvious.

The third change is easy to describe, but hard to nail down where it came from. That being the shape of his eyes. Changing from the semi toon-ish look of 2018's Spring Thaw Mud march, I tried out a somewhat egg-shaped look that I rotated a bit to resemble upside-down aviator sunglasses. Much of the point appears to be eliminating sharp edges in his eyes, while allowing the flexibility to narrow and expand according to expression. Another change was increasing the lineweight of his eyelashes to better outline the eyes, in line with those found on a variety of Japanese-style depictions of male characters with less-than angular facial features.

Having compiled these changes together, I set about trying them out on a variety of positions and expressions, ranging from neutral to shock, and opposite ends of the spectrum with anger and cheerfulness. That last one being something I've done so rarely with this character that it felt weird drawing him that way. But a cheerful, approachable (confident?) demeanor will be necessary to improve his visual attractiveness, to the point where he can elicit positive comments like those Bastien got in Ancient Art Archive: Bastien(1999) and its 2020 counterpart, without resorting to the tactic of drawing him posing wearing nothing but a smug smile and an erection, since that's OOC for him, and while FA is replete with folks who love that material, there are precious few of them watching me, as far as I know*

A full-body pic will follow this one showing him exhibiting some confidence, perhaps bordering on cockiness.

Digital drawing done in Clip Studio paint EX. 17 layers, 9MB .CLIP file. Part of Project ID# 496

*source: I eyeball the faves of new watchers and unfamiliar names +faving my pics out of the blue.

(link hitcounts at time of posting, in order of appearance: 198, 816, 858, 189, 346)