My first drawing of Harriet started when I was experimenting with an oil transfer process onto guache. Decided I liked the character, and just made a story around it. She's this blob kind of floating in the middle here.
Believe it or not the story I was testing the oil transfer for was a children's storybook idea about fairies that live in a frozen-esque winter landscape--so this is supposed to be like a fairy castle, and Harriet was supposed to be a fairy but the wings didn't come out. Anyway, none of that went into the current story which is for a considerably older audience and takes place in the East Coast.
And the last nice polished drawing I did of her looks like this although she'll never appear like this in the comic since the whole thing is black and white and a rather simplified style.
Fred appeared in that same oil paint transfer experiment and looked like this:
And the last picture I drew of him was this (he's the one on the right. I haven't done a polished painting of Freddie yet. I should.):
And that was the only people in Alchemist Burnouts for kind of a while. Gordy wasn't added till like waaay later despite him being the main character right now.