More Riley (Patreon)

What's this? Another bonus Riley art? On a Friday? *deep breath* Whaaaaaaaaaaa -
So, it's getting annoying for me to pile all my art posts onto Wednesday. So going forward, weekly sketches will be posted on Fridays instead. Starting with this extra bonus sketch!

I've drawn a LOT of Riley being her crazy kitty self, with that semi-insane, Cheshire-cat grin of hers that has become such an important part of her design for me. Here's a few sketches of her where she's maybe being a little more normal. The pose on the left was traced from an app to help me better envision the right proportions for her. The one on the right was freehand because I'm lazy and I hate using references.

I've been struggling to write this character for Chapter 5, namely because she's quite a difficult character to write. She has a handful of serious mental disabilities and some would be very impactful to her life, so it's very important to me to address that part of her character seriously and responsibly in the narrative without just using them as the punchline for every joke. It's okay for some of the other characters in the story to regard her as abnormal, dangerous, or insane, and it's fun to laugh at quirky behaviors or just life in general sometimes, but underneath her flaws, she's a person. However she might appear in Kiva's story, from Kiva's perspective, Riley needs to be able to live with her flaws and thrive in her OWN story despite them.

Anyway, since really fleshing out and nailing down Chapter 5's script has been such a huge focus for me this week, I haven't gotten much work done on the next comic page, so there likely won't be a new comic this Wednesday. But we'll return on the 13th! With the first page of Chapter 4!