Xill sketches

A few months ago I posted about the work I did for Inkwell Ideas' Monster Stand Ins (available now on RPGNow).  Looks like the project's done well enough for them that they now have another, similar project in the works.  They've contracted me for another monster, this time I'm working on the monster race called the Xill.  This is the description from Paizo:

Xills are the scourge of the Ethereal Plane, conquering everything in their paths with only one purpose: to perpetuate their race at the expense of others. All xills are female and capable of fertilizing their own eggs, but require living hosts to incubate these eggs, which they inject into paralyzed victims by means of a grotesque ovipositor normally kept retracted behind their mandibles. Evil and alien, the plane-shifting xills possess impressive intelligence and a totalitarian, militaristic culture all their own. Though they see most other life forms as incubators, they particularly prize phase spiders for this purpose.

Sketching out the Xill took a long longer than I thought it would, and I sketched stuff like insect heads as well as predator heads and tried to merge those into a really disgusting looking monster.  Inkwell's Joe Weztel chose sketch number 1 from the sketches above, and so you'll see me developing that image in the days to come.