Character design for grantaire. it was a really unusual experience coming up with a design for a character i have been drawing over and over and realizing that i haven’t been drawing him the way i want to?
mainly i just changed his nose, because i feel it would have been badly broken during an ugly boxing match that he was too drunk to have even attempted.
Sometimes i think about maybe making his face more square and his features broader and more unpleasant, but i really enjoy imagining grantaire’s ugliness as being conditional rather than inherent. Like, he wasn’t born ugly, but his life made him ugly. Grantaire as a wasted man with a wasted face.
Perhaps he was mildly pleasant to look at as a youth, with a charming smile, until he got older and his eyes grew sad. Then with the drinking and the opium came a sickly and worn face. Years of drifting between jobs in different towns with different lives wore him down until he looked haggard, ugly, and aged beyond his years. By time he fell in with the Amis he’d learned to embrace his ugliness and mask the bitterness with his now cynical smile, but maybe that haunted look never quite left his eyes.
Reblogging this again because getting over Grantaire’s eyes does not seem like a thing that’s going to happen. Good grief Nisie’s headcanon pings like whoa for me. Picture him mouthing off drunkenly every cynical unbelieving rambling sarcasm that ever crossed his mind; or even, occasionally, finding solace in a few moments of levity (a walk in crisp Parisian air, breakfast with cheerful Joly and Bossuet, considering a sketch and a glass of bad wine with Gros or the way candlelight falls across a sleeping Jehan, AHEM); but then these eyes, and their piercing desolation. A man who’s given up on nearly everything (all but one thing, in fact), and especially himself, someone broken beneath a veneer of alcohol and bluster. Ouch. Ouch ouch ouch. To paraphrase a tag I once read, when I look at this Grantaire’s eyes I think, leave me to die alone in a cave, and let’s face it that’s exactly how it should be for such a character.
