WIP Wednesday!

Today I can share whole-page WIPs because there's nothing visual that gives away the punchline. Here, Juni and Emma emerge from the gym at Camp Bondsteel gym. The gym really was pretty well fitted-out with a lot of stuff, and was always crowded.

Here it is showed with the underlying pencil work still intact. I kind alike these WIP phases; I feel like they show how different the initial sketch was from what is being made. This is also the first comic I made back in the USA, using entirely my home computer, scanner, and so on. It is so nice having ready access to my tools! Holy cow, I missed this.

Now I am showing the cleaned-up version and the initial color splashes. Eventually a lot of this will be changed, because (for example) the side of the gym was so sun-bleached that the proper brown Seahut color really wasn't applicable... and unlike the Seahuts, which seemed to get painted every so often, painting the gym seems to have been considered unfeasible probably due to the size.

Of all the things that I thought would be a pain in the butt about this comic, I did not consider that it would be all the little pebbles. Still, I am glad I did them. All the walkways throughout Camp Bondsteel were gravel, with a lot of really big gravel chunks that were almost baseball-sized.

And here we are. Yes, there really is a banner on the gym saying "Don't Walk By" and they even sell merch with that slogan on it in the nearby PX. T-shirts, hoodies, you name it. The ladies have some sweat dripping off them and staining their shirts since they've been working out and, by the time we were getting ready to leave, the temperature had risen a lot and it had gotten hot quickly. Balkan summers appear to be "muggy & buggy", so I am glad we got out of there when we did.

That said, I still have a lot of Kosovo-centered humor to keep going for a couple more months, so I will run those out before switching back to the regularly-scheduled programming with Joe Rock at the Reserve Combat Engineers unit, the 213th.

Until next time!