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!