Feeling Like Sergeant Opet...

...or How 5 Minutes with a Marker can Improve Everyone's Morale

We had a bit of a long Battle Assembly (Reserve Drill) weekend this month. A pair of early mornings, coupled with some long drives left a lot of people with some frustration and frayed nerves. To top it off, the drive to the range on Saturday started with SSG Wright being scared half to death.

She's terrified of wasps and bees. The Humvee we were about to drive down just happened to have a nest of those particular insects directly above her seat. Luckily, some good observational skills and quick reaction from a few of the other passengers solved the problem without anyone getting hurt, but it still caused some momentary panic and confusion.



That evening, when we finally had a few free moments, I pulled out a pencil, a marker, and my sketch pad. 5 minutes later I had the little cartoon you see above - just in black and white (I used Photoshop to add the colors). After getting SSG Wright's approval (I wouldn't want to offend her), I showed it around the unit, to good reception. I may just do more of these for drill weekends where events occur that warrant it.

A Layout, to be finished later

Turns out my base sketch over which I do my detailed drawings is truly too light for my silly little feed scanner to properly detect. The above image is quite preposterously photoshopped just to make most of the lines semi-visible. Well, hopefully that particular problem will be solved before too long.

Still, this is obviously just a page layout, roughing in the shape of the cells and the positions of the characters, objects, and text. The plan is to spend further days this week actually turning this into a proper, visible, colored page complete with text and some sort of header bar that advertises the character. We'll see how much of that I get done. At the very least, I'll have some sort of semi-complete product posted on Saturday, to meet my weekly requirement. Hopefully sooner, but I can never be too sure how much time it will take or how much time I'll have to devote to it. At any rate, I may just post the page's header bar (which will be designed separately anyway) as another bit later on this week. Perhaps tomorrow or Friday.