Design Corner: Tess
Oh hey, remember "Design Corner"? Let's take a walk through Tess's everyday design, from her earliest chronological appearance to her last.
We get one glimpse of Tess in what's implied to be her freshman year.
Tess's hair was long wavy brown. She has the center part and prominent front locks of hair we'll see throughout her design, along with crimped whiskers, but she has no visible accessories at this point.
In her sophomore year, Tess falls in with Roger and totally revamps her look.
She starts dying the front locks of her hair pink and seems to straighten the back of her hair. She accessorizes with a collar and a changing assortment of bracelets, as well as a tank-top and skirt combo that shows off a little of her midriff.
She gets four ear piercings and has three tail...piercings? clips? Two look like studs and one looks like a ring. The ring is normally (but not always) the furthest from the base of her tail. She also gets an eyebrow piercing on her left eyebrow, just like Augustus.
But by junior year, she's broken up with Roger and is trying to reinvent herself. Enter High School and enter, Tess! This is her introduction in the comic.
She's ditched the earrings, eyebrow piercing, tank top, collar, and skirt and cut her hair short, but she's kept the tail piercings and the pink dye in the front of her hair. She's also opted for two thick black bracelets as a standard part of her look and debuts her locked-heart necklace.
The very bottom of the back of her hair is also dyed now. In its original design, her hair was a little longer, sticking up at the top and longer all-around in the back.
The front locks of her hair were originally drawn way longer very shortly after her introduction, but in revision they're kept around chin-length.
By December of that year, the front of her hair does grow a bit, going past her chin and forming little fluffy puffs at the bottom.
Tess's look doesn't shift further until the Silvershore Isles arc ushers in a new art style:
The fluff at the bottom of her dyed hair was drawn with some extra texture in this style, but that got removed in revision.
More notably, while the prominent flyaway bits of hair on top of her head were edited out of Volume 1, they survived the Volume 2 edits. They'll also return later in a flashback where the original scene has since been revised to remove them:
At any rate, when senior year comes around Tess comes back to school with a new haircut:
She's cut her pink hair the shortest we've seen it, getting rid of the little tufts at the end. The back of her hair also is cut shorter, eliminating the dyed back. The two strands of hair that were sticking up on top have been shorn for good this time.
Tess retires the locked heart and debuts her star necklace in "Feline Filibuster"
The watercolor era brings a few changes to how Tess is stylized.
Tess's pink hair meets in a center part and forms a prominent "V" shape in her forehead where the locks grow. In previous styles, her hairline would often be level across her forehead, with more pink hair in the shadow of the prominent locks lifting up in the front. That doesn't happen anymore in the watercolor era, simplifying the design to the "V" shape. The effect gives Tess a dramatic widow's peak-esque look. The ends of her pink hair also don't taper off in a point anymore, but instead are fluffy.
The way the star necklace is shaded also changes, giving it a much greater appearance of three dimensionality. It also shifts a bit between being pointy and rounded.
As time progresses, the front of her hair grows back out to almost chin-length.
And so, that completes the evolution of Tess's design! Farewell, Tess! It was fun watching your design change as you reinvented yourself and grew as a character.
