H‐R diagram showing evolutionary tracks from the models of Fagotto (1994) for Z = 0.004 (dotted lines) at 9 and 5 M_⊙. The solid lines contain the region of the downward slope of the evolutionary path in which the RSGs spend the majority of their time for Z = 0.004 (left) and Z = 0.008 (right). RSGs of the present work are represented by the same symbols as in Fig. 1. Also shown at lower luminosities are the data for NGC 458 (open circles) and NGC 1850 (small filled circles).