Paging Dr. Herbert West

So, I finally finished that Women record. It took way longer than it should have, mostly because I was dragging my feet and wildly distracted by the weather. I'm pretty pleased with how it came out. I used Microns to ink it instead of the brush I usually use, and while I definitely prefer the way my brush lines look, I needed to use pens for this because it was so much work and I drew it at such a large scale and pens are much faster (and reproduce a little better). I also used Photoshop, which I hate, to add the color because I understand that a true solid color reproduces much better in limited color printing, and I wanted to make things easier in that respect. I'm the first to admit when I'm being a stubborn cavewoman, and I can see how using photoshop for a few things can make it way more usable and printable. But man, I feel so much better when I'm actually painting something with my hands, and I feel like everything I personally do looks better when done by hand.
I'm actually really excited about how the back cover came out design wise and once again was excited to draw those tails.
I'm also pretty pleased with the lettering, which was basically what I did on the labels. It's supposed to look hairy. I really like doing hand lettering, though it can be frustrating and there's lots of room for stupid and hard to correct misspellings and errors (zack's "birtday" card is a very good example of this haha)

And here's a close up of a screaming rat face!
Oh and a word about the theme: after a lot of back and forth and changes of ideas the band wanted to do something Re-animator themed, with a dead rat and a syringe full of the green reanimation fluid (though I think the rat is actually from Beyond Re-animator) . I was delighted because I like rats and drawing rats (and anything gross with a million tiny hairs) and I love horror movies. The back cover and the labels were sort of vaguely rat king related. The sewn together rats on the front were an idea I had that came from a couple sources. Inspired in part by the mouse with a human ear grown on it, in part by the death of Chang and Eng, and also by an account in Stiff by Mary Roach, in which she describes a series of experiments where the head of a dead dog was transplanted onto a living dog and supplied oxygenated blood before brain death could occur. The transplanted head lived (for a couple days or weeks in different instances) an obviously tragic and confused existence on the live dog, and they occasionally even bit each other. Aside from that being an incredibly cruel account of Mengele-esque animal torture, it's a really good example of modern science falling squarely in line with true mad science. That is definitely an experiment Dr. Herbert West would have done.

I got started on the the Laurel Hill project immediately after finishing this one. It's basically a race against time at this point! 10 days to finish!!!