This is the earliest picture of Rachel Griffin, which I drew during the very first roleplaying session back in the early fall of 2010. (It was traced in part from a picture of an anime girl, but that girl was in modern dress, so I adjusted it.)
Back then, Vroomie was a regular broom, steeplechasers and bristlelesses were to come later. Next to her is Mistletoe, her black-and-white familiar.
Early on, Rachel wore glasses, but after a while, we forgot about them, though we kept her flyaway hair*. I had originally thought she would be bookish, but I had just read The Kane Chronicles by Rick Riordan and had been impressed by the adventurous spirit of Sadie Kane and by the adventurous spirit of Jade Chan on the Jackie Chan cartoons, so when adventures arose, I decided she could be her more adventurous.
It is because of this that she became The Lady Rachel Jade Griffin…the Jade is named after Jade Chan. This is canonical. Ellen Kim had been a fan of the Jackie Chan cartoons and picked that middle name for her daughter because she liked that character. (The gatehouse was probably originally set up for her to be able to watch television and listen to music. The cartoon would have come out just after she was married.)
*—a funny story about flyaway hair. Readers of Romance expect girls to have flyaway hair that will not stay kempt. 99.9% of romance heroines have hair like this. It is sort of a literary shorthand way of telling the reader that this is the heroine—the intelligent, possibly bookish, one who isn’t perfectly polished like her society girls peers, a young woman who is more interested in the important things in life than in primping and fashion and public opinion. I gave Rachel hair like this for that very reason.
Only after I had written the first book did I discover that this particular literary trope is unknown to readers who do not read romances, particularly many male readers. For some of these, there seems to be only one character they have read about who has hair that won’t stay in place. So in the early days, I was told by more than one beta reader that I should not give Rachel such hair… because it would be obvious I was copying Harry Potter.
At first, this astonished me. But after I thought about it, it made me smile. Harry Potter was, of course, written by a woman, who was familiar with the same trope that I was and gave Harry such hair for exactly the same reason.
In case you had ever wondered, Rachel’s unruly hair has nothing to do with Harry Potter. :-)
For other pictures of Rachel used during the game years—or rather for pictures of what Rachel might have looked like some years later—follow the link below. Most of these are Chinese actress Tiffany Tang (aka Tang Yan). The one with glasses is Gong Xinliang. The one to which the Raven has been added is Korean model Kim Shin Yeong.
I don't see the link to the different representations of Rachael
xavier