drugsandwires

Kickstarter wallpaper + Random bits

For those who don't follow us on our Discord's #patreon channel, i figured I might make a post with everything I haven't posted on here yet.

First up is a wallpaper i'm thinking of putting on these floppies I've been working on as part of our future kickstarter. We'll also have some other stuff on there like a 100% legit demo of Dreamspace 3.03 and whatever else I can squeeze on 1.44 mb 

The label I designed for said floppies:

2018-06-17 19:20:14 +0000 UTC View Post

Volume 1 Cover(s)

For a long time I couldn't quite figure out what I want on the cover of volume 1, but a few days ago I finally got an idea that gets across what our comic is about pretty well - and the answer to that was a double cover. Initially i thought of like, actually having a hole in the main cover, but that would be a huge pain to do and probably wouldn't even look that great, especially on a softback. So having "the true cover" as page 3 works much better. 

I just want to add that while I am kno...

Chapter 5 Page 16

Guess we really should move the update to Tuedays. Or even wednesdays?...

 This page was quite challenging and i feel like I didn't quite do it justice, but I did what I could. I sure hope people remember Tasha, Vlad's girlfriend who finally makes an appearance for the first time since chapter 2.

I kept bugging  Io about figuring out what we're doing for Troy interacting with Russian speakers - I personally find language barrier a fascinating thing to explore, but I also realis...

Drugs & Wires sticker pack design + Guest art sneak peak!

I spent the past few days designing some stickers for MCM/upcoming kickstarter! I've been documenting the process excessively on our patreon-only discord channel, so do have a look if you can. Just sent these into print and I really hope i didn't mess it up too badly. There's quite a few technical limitations with these unlike individual stickers, and yet for some reason I really, really wanted to make it a sheet. Some of these have a potential to be redesigned into an enamel pin later?

I'm ac...

Chapter 5 Page 15

Heyyy, I'm slightly less late this time around. Maybe I'll even gather the energy to draw on Saturdays again.

I've been looking forward to  making that weather even less hospitable to Troy. I've also been looking forward to drawing Dan making a rude gesture and getting away with it, thanks to that tactical bloodtester placement. 

Dan is pretty absent in this chapter, but when he's in, he's still doing Dan things. Like drinking before driving a bunch of minors around.

Chapter 5 Page 14

The bad news is that our comic's schedule is still all over the place, the good news is that...it's still coming out? And our patrons are getting convenient reminders about it at the very least? Really hoping I can get back on track soon. I am not having much luck with weekends lately,

Anyway, this page is chock full of references and I don't want to give any of them away this time, but I hope people have fun searching for them. Apparently there's even one I don't know that Io might eventually...

Never too late for a 420 doodle

Lin's love of takeaway makes so much sense now. 

Chapter 5 Page 12

oh, Vlad. Thought you could get out this easily?

I always have tons of fun drawing this guy. Hope he stays intact for a little while longer. Drawing Filosof slowly losing his cool was fun too - and for some reason I just couldn't help myself and referenced his pose in #6 off my favourite prosecutor...

R.U. A Cyberpunk??

Some time ago I was going through a bunch of old ideas/scripts Io collected from our old conversations and found this spoof he was working on. I think any cyberpunk fan has seen this image being posted and reposted countless times. I actually own the original book it appears in, too. Anyway, I figured it'd make for a nice extra for The Book I'm planning, so I took Io'...

Chapter 5 Page 11

Some D&W pages are more decompressed than others and this is definitely one of them - but fear not, for next one is gonna make up for it! 

I'm still figuring out how to draw dogs and this bulldog's mouth has definitely been a challenge-finding a good reference has been quite difficult so I guess I did mostly just wing it in the end.  I also wish I made the attack panel more dramatic - i think it's one of those things that needs more thumbnailing and prep before drafting it into t...

Early Setting Notes

Since we're celebrating our third anniversary this month, I thought it might be fun to brush the dust off some of the very, very earliest concepts for D&W.

Starting the planning process, we were very much in unmapped territory. Mary's standalone comics hinted at a grungy near-future city (back then simply "City One") overwhelmed by a Brazil-esque surveillance state, but that was already start and end of it. However, Mary had been drawing little bits and pieces of what wou...

Chapter 5 Page 10

I've barely managed to get this page done on time, so i think for the time being double updates might not be a thing. Sorry about that! As soon as I'm done preparing stuff for the book and getting used to my new job, I'll do my best to do those again.

Chapter 4 Page 9

First page completed since me starting a full-time job again - as such, sorry for the slight delay! I do hope my new schedule won't affect D&W too much. Last week I've been spending every evening after work prepping pages for future kickstarter, so things are moving! I've also done some more pencilling on BPA, very much hoping to print the first 28 or so pages for it for MCM if I get a place.

Not much commentary for this page-we're *still* in the same environment. This might just be our lo...

Chapter 5 Page 8

Can you tell i'm running out of interesting ways to frame this convo? I should probably get back to this whole background drawing business at some point. I am trying to pay more attention to body language though.

I still love how Dan gets interrupted by every single member of the cast unless they need him to talk. Io is so cruel.

Business card translates to "bed-bug and cockroach extermination in Unylsk"

Chapter 5 Page 7

Terribly sorry about the late update, or rather, a missed update at this point. I do have this week's page in the works, but it's still gonna take a few days. Hope I can catch up soon. I got stranded in Ireland for longer than I'd hoped due to snow, so I tried to do as much of this page as I could on my iPad Pro, but while I'm already drawing BPA on it, D&W has existing style and quality to adapt to so I'm still getting used to the new workflow. I've decided to do some tweaks on my Cintiq af...

Chapter 5 Page 6

Dan got *told*. 

This page was an easy one thanks to my mildly lazy talking heads layout, but hopefully the ALL THE DOGS panel compensates for it.

I really want to name the shiba pupper Satoshi.

The working name for the Big St Bernard Doge is Medved ("Bear"), however I think we planned for her to be a female dog? Or at least...I did. And in Russian Medved is male, and Medveditsa would be female. Which is possibly a bit long for a dog name. So Medved might have to be A...

Chapter 5 Page 5

Extra page is late this week due to me being a bit under the weather, but I managed to get it done..just before starting work on the Monday's page. Webcomics, amirite?

I was dreading drawing a drawn out dialogue between the two of them, but thankfully having dogs around makes it a bit more entertaining. There were some scripted in pupper interactions Io had to remove, so i'm glad I can at least have them in the background

Anyway, not much commentary for this week, so here's some closeups...

Chapter 5 Page 4

Hope you like exposition, because Sandman has it. 

But, considering the worm's been a total mystery for 4 chapters, I think it's about time we started getting into it.

Our Discord readers pointed me to a real exploit i ended up using for the code - http://www.users.nac.net/splat/winnuke/ I was gonna actually consult one of our regulars about it, but in the end didn't get around to it. Of course, at this ...

Chapter 5 Page 3

Sorry for the delayed update, guys - this page really kicked my butt. On the plus side, you get a larger version of this panel, since i put way too much effort into it.

And here's a render of a model I half stole, half made for Sandman's lair. Currently working on maybe making it into a matte painting kinda thing people could use as a wallpaper maybe! Though mostly I'...

Height chart: Dreamspace ops

Something I've been meaning to do since before the comic even began - and it's a shame I never got around to it, since I learned a lot about how I've been drawing things wrong. Like, Lin is very short, but how *quite* as short and giant-headed as I tend to draw her. And I tend to draw Dan so lanky, he looks like he should be towering over everyone, but I actually wanted Vlad to be the freakishly tall one :p

Hopefully I'll get around the other characters some other time, so let me know if there...

Chapter 5 Page 2

We finally get back to Nate - and his room. God, that took me forever to ink. All those poster. Hopefully it does tell you a little bit about the character, though, especially with how little screen time he's been getting.

Original script said nothing about VR, but naturally if anyone were to use VR for no good reason other than to show off their TRON avatar, that would be Nate. I do think the result came out a bit too cramped - As always, I thought about every panel separately rather than how...

Chapter 5 Page 1

Getting back into drawing D&W is never easy, especially after working on some work for hire stuff. Every chapter I pray that we finally streamline the way we work on the pages and every time we just kind of wing it and suffer through. Or at least, I wing it because by the time I get to drawing a page, I'm either late or approaching deadline. Hopefully I'll find a moment to get ahead on the pencils for patrons. Or at least do some layouts in bulk. That would be a good start.

Anyway, here's ...

Chapter 5 Cover (no logo version)

Yes! D&W's finally coming back. As always, making a chapter cover was a bit tricky and, should chapter 5 get published as an issue, there's a good chance i'll redo it.

Originally I had some vague ideas for both Sandman and Troy, but after asking Discord patrons on what they'd like to see, Sandman was an obvious choice. I thought i'd do a homage to one of the Dogs Playing Poker paintings and did some thumbnails for it while travelling:

2018-01-15 23:36:41 +0000 UTC View Post

D&W Creator Commentary - Chapter 4, Pages 12-13

Eve - or rather, an idea of Eve - has hovered over Dan's sad little story since the first page of Chapter 1, often literally so. Anybody who's read Dreamspace can probably understand the fixation: more than anything else, the moment Eve walked on out of Dan's life marks the point where Everything Went Wrong(TM). After that: downward spiral, Skullfuck, dehumanizing delivery job, dow...

Polaroid'94 (album link below)

Here's a link to all the images 

So I've been really struggling with BPA and extras for Drugs & Wires in general as of late and it was getting me down quite a bit - not only i'm being supported to work on these, but it's supposed to be my passion project! And yet it's been incredibly difficult.

 Anyway, I was testing some instagramy filters in Filter Forge the other day by putting random D&am...

Upcoming guest art!

Here's an early preview of next week's guest art by H-P Lehkonen! He did a fantastic job on it:) Can you guess what image it's based on?

I was planning on posting it this week, but H-P is releasing his new comic next week, so I'll put the link to it as the art goes up on the 18th instead! Stay tuned.

Don't forget all $3 patrons have access to an exclusive channel in our otherwise public 2017-12-11 14:34:39 +0000 UTC View Post

Patreon Fees

Hey, patrons - as most of you might have heard by now, Patreon will be changing the way it's charging patrons soon, adding the processing fees on top of pledges rather than having them come out of creator's earnings at the end of the month:

While it does mean we get more money out of it, I know it's not ideal for low tier pledges, particularly those in EU countries who already pay extra. Like many art...

Things to doodle at 3am

I'm gonna start a new section of this patreon and it's all gonna be just Sandman and various dogs.

...I'm sorry, life has been frustrating lately and I just have to draw cute things to deal with it

3am thoughts

....Seeing how BPA is in a really unexciting place right now I just had to let myself get ahead of the plot. I'm actually really behind on all of my work so wasting time probably isn't the best move. On the other hand, I've been feeling burned out from just drawing stuff in our scripts so I thought it might help if I spend more time reconnecting with my characters and just drawing random unedited crap like I used to. I'll aim for more sketches and warmups in the future, too - I feel like my work...

Discord integration for Patrons!

Hey everyone - those who have already joined our public Discord server probably already know, but for the rest of you - I've made a patron-only room for everyone pledging $3 or more where I'll be posting small work in progress shots, long lost sketches and anything I don't want to put into a separate Patreon post. It's also a good alternative to private streams which I never quite managed to schedule regularly enough. I'll probably be dropping some BPA progress work in there instead so everyone ...