Original Art Sundays (Tuesday) No. 227: Sharp Invitations cover preliminary

After a three-month hiatus, I am resuming posting art.
I've hardly been idle. In addition to the full time gig and adjunct teaching, I've been stabbing at my grant project, a graphic memoir titled Sharp Invitations. This is a memoir focusing on transgender life and on issues of poverty. Also rock & roll!
This is the biggest project I've ever attempted, and I have a very tight deadline. I do not expect the version submitted for the grant fulfillment to be the final version. I hope to get this published, ideally by one of the big guns, Fantagraphics or First Second being my primary choices.
I am jumping around in the book rather than working sequentially. This is largely because the work is so intimate and emotional that I have a hard time sitting down to work one chapter all the way though. I posted a rough of the first chapter for this more than a year ago. Each chapter will be a self-contained story, with overlapping narratives.
Here's a mock-up of the cover.

The basic layout will remain unchanged, but I might go for a more involved background than the pale blue watercolor wash. The core idea, the woman in the blade of the scalpel, will remain. I plan to do a more accurate rendering of the scalpel for the final. There's a curve to the handle, and a bevel at the start of the grip by the blade.
Materials: colored ink washes and colored pencil over inked line art. Typography done in Photoshop.
The body of the work goes much too slowly, but there is progress being made. I'm taking a week off of work in April to put the project to bed.
I currently have several pages that need to be lettered. I've committed to lettering this digitally and have included the purchase of two specific fonts in the grant proposal.
I will have more to report next week.