"Cartoonist!" cover design

I'm a member of the National Cartoonist Society and have been honored by being selected to be interviewed as a feature story for an upcoming issue of "The Cartoonist!", the newsletter mag for the NCS. For this they've requested a piece of art for the cover. Just a sketch or something. A lot of the questions were concerning my comic book "Opposite Forces" so I thought I'd make the cover feature them. (No copyright problems either). This is a little of the process. I did a really scribbly rough ( and a few others before this that I didn't want to scan), then refined it more on another sheet in blue (like giving Alexis a neck), and the last one here is a inked version. Now why I inked it is still a mystery to me because I don't want to Photoshop this, but render it more "by hand" with markers and colored pencils like the "Mermaid" piece a couple blogs ago. Problem is, I drew this on some real ratty photocopy paper that didn't even take the inks too good. Markers aren't probably going to work on this tissue paper. I will most likely resketch this on a better piece of paper and just render the thing a bit more sketchy (something else I originally wanted to do) with the markers and pencils. I MAY try to color the inked one to see how it looks also. It's ready to go anyway. Not everything on the inked version got better as you can see, maybe another good reason to do another. I'm just lazy, I don't want to.