Ch3Page25 Pencils + Layout Passes (Patreon)

Hey, here's the page I'm gonna be wrapping up tonight!

I guess now's a good time to show how this scene came together, because to this day this is probably the most iterations we've gone through. I'm sure Io's  gonna post his script drafts later, but in the meantime here are some layouts of my own.

To start off, I should mention the whole heroin scene wasn't in the script to begin with. But every now and again I'll get incredibly stubborn about something, and "Dan should try heroin before chapter 4 events" was one of those things, so I decided to have a go at writing it myself. We do have page contraints to work with though, trying to fit each chapter into 25-ish pages or so, so initially I drafted up another montage page-

It was kind of pointless though, conveying absolutely nothing other than the fact that he does indeed do a heroin that one time. So we scrapped it. But days before the next update was due, I had another  go at it.

(larger version here) 

Dan doesn't get much internal dialogue in the series, and I remember getting a note about it in one of our reviews and thinking how yeah, actually, it's kind of true. So I dedicated a page to Dan's mental gymnastics and him desperately trying to rationalise his bad life choices, then showing he's not in control in the next page where he snaps at Code4Food. This time Io liked it enough to do a rewrite of my dialogue in actual human English and we went ahead with it.

But just as I was about to start on page 25, Io did another rewrite and added more dialogue for Code4Food. It needed an extra page, but I thought it's worth it for all the extra feels, so more thumbs happened. Dan kept his cool  this time due to page constraints.

You'd think that was an end of it, but I actually had an extra page in mind to conclude the scene. I was thinking of sketching it out as a Patreon extra, "director's cut", so to speak, but it worked surprisingly well with Io's final edits, so he suggested we use that one, as well. Not posting it yet, but you'll see it soon enough.

And that's how a scene that wasn't supposed to exist in the first place ended up growing 4 pages long. 

I often envy people who can storyboard whole chapters ahead and have this quick, efficient workflow. But I also like our fluid and batshit way of working on D&W. Definitely keeps me on my toes. Drawing a page one by one instead of doing them all in bulk might be slower, but it gives us time to think things through and consider all the feedback we're getting. 

And that's it for today. Hopefully I'll see some of you on our D&W stream  later on :)