Ghoul Wife (not my wife who is a lovely, patient woman, the picture)

Been a few days.  I've been working on an item I'm thinking of running as a limited number of prints for Anthocon.  Outside of working on this I've spent the days losing my temper at all the wrong times, throwing kettle bells, and being a general pain in the ass for my wife.  Sorry babe.

So back to the illustration.  I was flipping through an old sketchbook from 7 years ago or so and saw this image.  I liked it.  Corpses, ghoul fem, possible acts of necrophilia or at least corpse eating, and decided it'd be a fun thing to work on to keep pushing my brush work.  Then I thought to myself, it might also make a good print for the table Rob and I will be sharing with Ken and Sarah of Shock Totem, at Anthocon.

So for your viewing pleasure and my chagrin to a certain extent:

The initial sketchbook er...sketch.

The new sketch based on the old sketch.  I knew I wanted it to retain a certain comedic feel so I made sure to exaggerate the corpse a bit. 

Actually taking my time for once and trying to figure out how this black liquid works, instead of diving in (I'm becoming a coward in my old age).

 And the 80% image.  I decided to push the Ghoul Wife more towards the way H.P. Lovecraft described them, doglike and mouldering.  I have to add more mouldering elements and scabrous skin (thank you white paint). Note the places were the brushwork works and where it doesn't.  Note the excessive amount of touch up white used.  Note the fact that I actually had a good time working on this, and I feel like I'm getting more comfortable working this way.  The best parts were worked in over the last 2 hours of work of course.  Why would it start out that way?

 Sonofabitch. 

I'll likely get rid of her pupils, bitch just looks flat crazy without them, and I like that.  Need to work out more values, and of course use more touch up. Feels pretty good though. There will be some sort of speech bubble or caption as well.  I'll show you that later though.