"Can we keep him Sarge?"

Bit of experimentation here.  I started by drawing the trooper on paper, scanning him into Inkscape, and converting him to PDF, for exporting into Xara.  Once he was in, I though he needed something else, so I drew the rest, and added colours in, Xara.  I found out a couple of useful things here - firstly, when inking the characters, I found it easier to keep the line settings to one of the standard line types, with NO pressure input from the pen.  I also found a great way with Xara 2013 to add shadows to characters - simply add a black shape covering the whole character, set it's transaparacy, and then erase what I didn't need using the shape eraser tool.  It all works great!