The crane wife

I've been trying to develop a series of illustrations for this story for a couple of years now, and I've never been happy with my preliminary work. I've picked the project back up again - this is one of my test sketches, it isn't quite to where I want it, but it's a lot closer than anything else I've done so far.

I've always liked stories like the crane wife (cupid and psyche, and selkie stories are others in the same vein). When I bought the Decemberists album a couple years ago it reminded me how much I loved the story when I was a kid.