There is the feeling like the clenching of a fist, there is a hunger in the center of the chest

For those of you playing the lyric guessing game, I'll be posting answers tomorrow.

Today's page is page eight, which means I'm a third of the way through the eighth issue. I was stuck on this one for a while, as I knew I needed a scene to separate page seven and what comes next. I finally hit upon the idea of making sure that Charlotte landed in Paris safely. It wound up being the perfect beat to separate things.

I think this may be the first time I've drawn Abby's bedroom. Come to think of it, we haven't seen Mark's either, and yet Charlotte's has been seen two or three times. I don't know what that says.

To decorate Abby's bedroom, I went to my own. I don't quite have the same bed, but I do have the same comforter, drapes, and end tables. Sometimes it's nice and quick to steal something I know rather than create something new, especially something that's only in one panel.

I also had to create a Paris scene. I wanted something away from the Eiffel Tower, because while Charlotte has a full scholarship, she doesn't have so good a free ride to get that kind of view. So I did my research on the internets. And I wanted Paris to look very different from Deco City has, so instead of using Illustrator like I do to design the Art Deco skyscrapers, I drew everything by hand. In fact, to get that older and more natural look, I didn't use a ruler or a French curve, either. I even colored it differently. If you look closely, you can see that I didn't really stay within the lines, at least of each building. I used the chalk tool and tried to get a textured, impressionistic feel.

The designs for Pixar's Ratatouille certainly were an inspiration too, as is much of what Pixar does. I highly recommend their Art of Ratatouille book, or any of their art books. They're little squarebound pieces of inspiration in my library.

So, things are going well with the book and I'm on a good pace. Time to work on page nine.