OK, not really, but I couldn’t resist.

My new site, Antemortem Arts, is on its way! There’s nothing up there yet (hence the lack of a link), but the CSS is done and then I have to slog through my Very First WP Theme Creation, and it’ll be ready to go!

Antemortem Arts is going to showcase my fine art the same way Not Dead Yet Studios (seeing a theme here?) showcases my design work. There’ll be a gallery of finished pieces (for sale and not), information on how to commission your very own art, and posts that show how some of my pieces have grown from a blank canvas into a finished work.

To kick things off, I’ll even be having a commission sale — just in time to think about getting that hard-to-please person something for Christmas. (Yes, I know it’s months away, but good art takes time!)

I’ve already got 2 or 3 people in my holiday queue, so if you’re interested, drop me a line — I’ll link you to a secret gallery and a few other commissions, and we can talk!

Every year I have a giant project that eats up my summer, and I’m happy to say that this year we set our deadline just once, and made the deadline — and it was today!

The 2010 Starcycles Calendar is up for sale at Georgia Stathis’ (the client) site, and she’s already had some pre-order sales!

This annual project is both great fun and great pain for me — the covers are a joy to do, running the gamut of themes and mediums depending on the feel of the upcoming year. This year we did an homage to Henri Rosseau and I painted a tiger (2010 is his year), lurking in his sunlit jungle. I’ll do a whole art post on him later, probably, but for now you can just barely see his golden eyes peering at you out of the foliage.

The great pain is of course doing the calendar pages! It’s a dayplanner style calendar with these wonderfully detailed and tedious visual codes in it. For example, there’s hearts (or broken hearts) for Venus, fog for Neptune, an up-and-down graph to show when the market’s trending, and wicked green shading on all those Mercury Retrograde days, so you always know when you’re scheduling a meeting in the middle of a muddle. The most popular (and most painstaking) feature is the Void of Course moons, which are blacked out on the margins of each day — if a moon is Void from midnight to noon, for instance, the first half of the day is covered in a black bar (at the edges), showing you in no uncertain terms what’s going on.

I love this project, and every year we wonder about doing it, it’s so much work. But Georgia uses it herself, and after 15 years of refining the visual language, it always seems a shame not to. So another year has gone by and it’s done, done, done!

This has been a week of meeting upon meeting, with things shifting under me like quicksand and throwing my schedule into constant, exhausting disarray. Early in the week I was still keeping to-do lists, wanting to get the everyday things done despite the energy demands of putting an introvert out into the world every day this week, but those fell by the wayside around Wednesday and I haven’t picked them back up — yet.

I finally realized that when I consider a meeting to be one item on a to-do list, I’m asking too much of myself. “Go out” is one thing, while “meet with another person or people” is a whole different expenditure of energy and willpower.

So, halfway through the week, I met myself halfway — I only did the necessary chores (mostly cat-related), I let things go that could be let go, and I concentrated on keeping my footing. I got through cancellations, reschedules, demanding social contact, and a cat who climbed on me every time I came home with the intention of never letting me leave the house again.

Coming to the end of the week with more meetings waiting, I rather want to let him have his way. But instead I’ll muster up my last dregs of energy and get myself ready for another day of maddening meetings, social demands, and not expecting the dishes to get done on top of it.

Having given myself that slack, I’m coming up on the weekend tired but happy, instead of frustrated and overwhelmed, and that’s worth a few dirty dishes or undone to-do items.