Painting on wood

I haven't put this lady up for sale yet because I'm working out how to photograph her (the fact that my camera stopped working the other day, except to take video, 'night' and 'action' shots doesn't help) -- but I thought I'd share the scanned image anyway.

I usually paint on canvas but this is on a piece of wood, from the craft store -- I always look at these plaques and am overwhelmed with ideas for what to put on them.  So overwhelmed that I almost never use them!  The possibilities are endless, for things to glue to them or adorn them with.  But really they just seem to cry out for an oval portrait. 

Since I'm well into the time of year where I just read endless volumes of ghost stories (most recently a collection of Marjorie Bowen; now I am reading AC Benson and RH Benson) I thought I would do a haunted portrait of a ghostly lady.  I'm not sure what her story is, yet -- she has a poppy-like flower at her throat.  Perhaps hers is a sad tale of opium dreams and tragic death at a young age.  Perhaps she hung above a fireplace in an abandoned manor, obscuring an inscription on the wall that holds the key to an ancestral secret and a lost inheritance.  Perhaps not.  But while I sort all that out, here is her pale ghostly portrait.