Author: Alex Heberling

Alex Heberling here. I own the place.

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Alex Heberling

Here’s the WIP I posted to DA last night of my Malt Shop MLP illustration.

I’m quite a bit farther than this now (counter drawn, flat colors applied) but I probably wont have time to finish it for a couple days, so here’s part of the sketch and the lineart stages. ^_^

(Twlight and RD are totally PoC.  U mad, Chuggs?)

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Alex Heberling

Audrey is now a black woman.  Race was pretty incidental to her character anyway, so she’s pretty much the same otherwise.  She’s a dancer, athletic, and very strong.  I’ve given her a dramatic hourglass figure.

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Alex Heberling

Lauren also is not changing very much from G1, but I am giving her dark hair to go with her more Hebraic features.  She’s always been Jewish, but she was blonde before.

In my head, she was always a bit bigger than the rest of the girls were at the time, even if my art skills didn’t show it well.  She’s apple-shaped in G2.

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Alex Heberling

Andy (short for Andrea) and Hannah aren’t really changing that much from G1.  They are Scarlett and Citrus, respectively.  (I drew Hue Scarlett a little while back, if you look through my recent posts.)

They are totally in lesbians.  Oh, the angst there will be!

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Alex Heberling

Our main heroine here is Samantha.  She’s a somewhat timid girl of South Asian descent.

When the Hues transform, their hair and eye colors change to their respective hue, which in Sami’s case, is white.

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Alex Heberling

I… have more or less decided I’m going to go through with making The Hues into a comic.

TH has been my baby since I was 12 years old.  It began as, more or less, Sailor Moon fanfiction.  For a long time, in my adult life at least, I was convinced it would never see the light of day because I thought I’d lost all objectivity about it.  It’s been filed away in the back of my mind for quite awhile, but I’ve been mulling it over for the last year and a half or so, and I think I’m ready to move forward.

This picture is from 2003, approximately the last time I was working on it actively, as it was originally an epic tale spanning three books.  I actually did finish writing the first book, and if you look reeeeeeally hard in certain dusty corners of the internet, you can find it, poor pacing and characterization and all.

BUT, the new version will be a post-apocalyptic science fantasy, about a group of magical girls who discover their powers a little later than we would’ve liked.  Basically, the question I’m interested in is, “If the Big Bad invaded Earth and the Magical Girl Squad wasn’t ready, what would happen?”

And to cut into the painful whitey-whiteness of our main cast, the new cast will be multicultural, multiracial, and with a variety of body types.  It’s going to be SO RAD.

Anyways, I’m not sure when I’ll be starting The Hues, since I only have the very basic story arcs in my head at the moment, plus changing the setting to post-apocalypse throws a bit of a wrench in the existing mythology I had before, but I think I can carry the basic spirit of the old stuff and put it into the new stuff.

And all this was to let you know that, last weekend at Matsuricon, I spent some of my idle time at the table doing some concept sketches.  So here they come!