Had fun with this page and its turning out to be one of my favorites so far. It called for Lyra to be ascending above the city, going through a cloud layer, and having a series of flashbacks, reflecting on her recent events, the stars reflecting in her eyes.

The script is really loose and leaves me total creative freedom, which I love, but there's always a stretch that's briar patch of challenges.

Rising above the city - no problem - through the clouds - check. I printed off a few photo refs for the city layout, but made sure that all the buildings were our own design - no swiping - just got some good arial shots to help establish the city layout. OK, panel 1 done - on to panel 2.

I wanted to get a little closer to Lyra, the closest we've been so far (she was in a berzerker rage before, and wouldn't let us get any closer - she's a little more vulnerable now, reflective, and we can sneak up on her). That's actually the sort of thing that runs through my subconscious when approaching page layouts and storytelling.

I didn't want to do the typical flashback series we've all seen in other books - the alternate panel borders, the random images hanging in space, the collage effect - I wanted to do something new and different, so I thought 'why not use her wings as panels themselves'. Ah, great solution, but I had to put the wings in a sort of forward thrust positioin to pull it off, and hopefully it translates well

Last panel, stars in her eyes - we weren't close enough to see this effect in the first two panels, and I didn't want to black out her eyes in them either. My thought was that if she's reflecting on past events, she's sort of regained a bit more of her humanity, so her eyes should be human there. But on this panel, they needed to reflect starlight.

At first I had them as human eyes, with the starlight reflecting in the pupil, but that was way too small to translate the image. Then, I thought about making them all black. That's OK, but it seemed so sudden going from clear eyes in the panel previous to all of a sudden black, especially in such an 'instantaneous' small panel. So then, thought 3 came, and now we have an eye that is being filled with blackness, in transition, and reflecting starlight in the black.

OK, so there we have it, pg 6. A little photoshop touchup before filing it and sending it off.