Do you ever have those days where you feel like a very small animal in a very big world? I think of them as my Piglet days, and when I drink tea out of my Piglet mug it fortifies me greatly, but those feelings still lurk under the caffeine bravado.

Sometimes they’re brought on by something specific — a comment someone makes, something I’ve read, something I’ve seen. Sometimes they just seem random, coming with the rain or just out of the blue. My Piglet moods never last for more than a few days, replaced by my more usual quiet, easy Pooh bear moods, taking one thing at a time and not worrying too much unless the cupboard’s low on honey.

This week’s a bit of a Piglet week for me — I’ve been reading a book with a lot of art processes alluded to in the fiction, things I’ve never had the chance to learn about. I feel a bit of a fraud when I read about people working and working on their art, day in and day out, learning new ways of seeing, new ways of using light and color, glazes and washes and underpaintings. I never learned any of those things, really, and I always just feel lucky to have remembered to use light at all, let alone tried to do so in a way that would make someone remark upon its uniqueness, for instance.

But I keep painting anyway, trying to hang on to the inspiration that also comes with the Piglet feelings, to give my inner Piglet lots of warm bear hugs and tea.

New web technology gives me this feeling sometimes, too. I was a coder, once, back in the mists of time, and let me tell you, I hated it even when I was good at it. So whenever web design starts to slide further and deeper into coding, I get the heebie jeebies and want to back away. But then someone wants something from me — or I want it from myself — and I fall right back into those Piglet feelings. Even though I know I made a conscious choice to move in this direction, it’s hard to remember why it matters when faced with all the things that I not only don’t know about web coding, but don’t particularly want to have to know.

The best solution I’ve found for code-related Piglet is to find him a nice Rabbit to work with, who knows just what to do and how to do it. Well, plus tea and bear hugs.

I’ve mostly soothed Piglet’s worries about Woozles, though sometimes it slides more into Eeyore for a day or two before Pooh takes back over. Today I raise my mug and set the Woozle worries aside to work on projects for happy clients, projects for myself, and just being me.

And that’s the very best thing for a bear to do, even one with a Piglet lurking inside.

My friend Nick asked me back in August, if I was going to do something for his 25th birthday party invitations, what would I do? And I immediately thought of this:

With this on the inside:

Nick tells me they were a great hit, and I have to say, I had a ton of fun doing them. He sent me dozens of photos from his childhood that I’d never seen before — I have to say, before I did these, I never realized how big Nick’s ears were! Poor kid.

They’re all done with pen & Copic marker, and then scanned and (after realizing how bad my scanner is with blond/brownish midtones) color corrected by hand. I delivered via emailed pdf, so he could print them onto his own cards at home, and then mailed the originals along in his birthday card as his gift.

Happy (now long past) Birthday, Nick!

I sometimes manage to paint even when it’s not for a commission, but I tend to be shyer about those pieces, more reluctant to post them. This piece has been done for months, hanging on my wall and becoming a part of my surroundings until I let myself forget that I hadn’t actually posted it. I actually did forget to take any “in progress” photos while I was working on it, though there weren’t too many stages this time around, either.

This painting was inspired by Roger Zelazny’s Amber series, in a roundabout way. In it he postulates a continuum of realities from the Pattern of Order at Amber to the Courts of Chaos at the other end, with the realities becoming stranger and more dangerous as they get closer to Chaos. I imagined a world where the sky had cracked open one night, its rough-velvet texture tearing down the middle and letting molten gold spill forth, sparking and changing and becoming like stars as it spread across the sky. I tried to capture that sense of motion, of chaos, with the three metallic colors of droplets (gold, bronze and a scarab red that shimmers and changes to old-bronze-green at certain angles).

Title: Molten Sky
Medium: Oil on canvas, 24″ x 24″
Price: $999 (free shipping in the US)

If dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts.
-The Counting Crows

When I moved in to my most recent apartment, I bought myself a lot of really nifty small appliances — a rice cooker big enough to also be a slow cooker, a bread machine, a shiny red toaster oven that reheats pizza like a dream, a food processor. I use them to varying degrees (I have bread in the freezer right now that I baked a few days ago, but the food processor gathers dust until I need shredded carrots), but I love them all to bits.

The one thing we had when I was a kid that I didn’t buy was an electric wok. Despite being very midwestern white folk, my mom had this great big green-enameled electric wok that she used to make us stir fry this and that, usually chicken and broccoli and carrots. I don’t think she even went so far as to use soy sauce, just the usual sort of spices she used in everything else, but it was a favorite meal of mine anyway.

So, my birthday’s coming up, and usually she sends me money, which I fritter away on things like eating out and iTunes music. This time, when she asked me what I wanted, those old ghosts of meals past bobbed up and I said I wanted an electric wok. I figured, she knew what hers did back ages ago, so she’d be better at choosing one that I would.

Let me tell you, I was so right.

I got it in the mail the day before yesterday and joyfully unpacked it, having been warned to expect a box from Best Buy. It was way, way snazzier than I remember.

It’s huge, for one thing — as big now as I remember the old one being, which means it’s probably a lot bigger, given I was 12 at the time. It’s sturdy and well-built and I can even wash everything but the detachable cord, so I can’t accidentally ruin it with misplaced suds.

Yesterday was our local farmer’s market so I loaded up on veggies and locally made curried tofu, and tonight (because after all that veggie shopping, pancakes were required last night… okay, and time for the wok parts to dry thoroughly) I finally broke it out. One cubed eggplant. One big bundle of rough-chopped broccoli. Some random things from cupboards for spicing and cooking (chicken stock ice cubes, oil, soy sauce, more curry, etc), and some chopped garlic & cilantro, and we were in business.

It’s nothing at all like my mother ever made, but it makes me remember helping in the kitchen and being happy with what was for dinner, and I love this first, haunted meal from my new toy.

Thanks, Mom!

On the face of it, dyeing one’s hair (especially as much hair as I have) is frivolous and vain, and an utter waste of money.

But dyeing my hair is a little like sprucing up my website — people who’d grown accustomed to one thing sit up and take notice again. Random strangers smiled at me on the street, and I realized I was smiling first. People I barely knew stopped me to compliment me on the new look.

Then I took it up a notch, and added nail polish. I love the way painted nails look, even though they chip pretty much instantaneously for me, I love to see them tapping away at keyboards and doing the most mundane of tasks.

In the end, all this vanity has given me something I needed a dose of — confidence.

Marketing materials can be the same way. If you love your business cards, if you’re thrilled with your website, then you’ll hand people your card with a big grin and say, “visit my site!” That confidence shows, and your prospect is excited to see whatever it is you’re so proud of. But if you don’t like what you’ve got, then you’ll be apologetic or reluctant, and that sends a message to the potential clients or customers that even you aren’t confident in your product or service.

So, next time you find yourself hesitating as you hand over your card, ask yourself — is it time for a marketing material makeover?

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.

I’m not originating any ideas here — Ittybiz, Copyblogger, Problogger, Fluent Self and a dozen other blogs have gone over this ground before, and probably dozens of people before them that they learned from. But it never stops being a good idea, and it’s one that’s hard to remember when you’re in the thick of things.

When you’re writing copy to sell people something, whether it’s a product or a service or even an idea, you need three things: Features, Benefits, and a Call to Action. Between these three things, you have to answer what Naomi calls the annoying inner three-year-old question: Why?

Let’s say you have a Widget. We want people to buy this Widget, and maybe even get upsold to the Whatchamacallit package, and you’re so excited about all the features you’ve built into the widget that you want to list them out in lovingly prepared bullet points. Which is great, actually, people like easy lists, but remember:

For every Feature, you need a Benefit.

Tell me what it does, sure, but then tell me why I care. Benefits without features just sound like random bragging, but features without benefits are equally pointless. If your widget perforates to perfection, that’s great. But what does that do for me? Tell me what I can do with those perfect perforations, and how that helps me in my everyday life, and then I’ll be ready to become a Widget owner in a heartbeat.

The last thing on the page (and if it’s a long page, perhaps the third, seventh, and fifteenth) is your Call to Action.

You can sell me on the features and benefits all you want, but if you never actually try to sell me the Widget, then the sale won’t truly be made. People love to be told what the next step is, so remember to point them to it. Whether it’s a blog comment, a sale, or an inquiry for your services, make sure it’s obvious what needs to happen next. And then tell your reader to do what you want them to — or ask, if that’s more your style, though be wary of softening the call to action until it’s more like a gentle whisper.

Remember, for maximum conversion (to use marketer-speak): Pair each feature with its benefit, and end with a strong call to action.

Then you’ll be on your way to Widget Mogul status in no time.

I’ve always had a knack for gift giving — whether it’s for clients or friends or friends-of-friends, I’ve always had that ability to walk through a store and say, “Yeah, they’d love that.” It’s kind of like my superpower, really — it’s netted me many smiles and much gratitude, and made gift-giving a joy instead of an obligation. I’ve even considered making a side business of it, but for now I just use my powers for the smaller good.

I was thinking today that the art of gift giving has a lot in common with the work of giving clients good design — you have to get to know them well enough to figure out what their real “thing” is, and then give them something that highlights it. If it’s a gift, and I know the person loves bats, then I’ll get them something bat-themed that also fits with the rest of their life, like a travel mug for a busy exec or a canvas tote bag for someone who’s going green (or just loves tote bags).

It’s a matter of listening to what they tell you, but also seeing what they show with their actions — sometimes it’s hard to get past what they think they want and down to what they really secretly expect. Like websites, for instance; often people will say that they just want “a presence, because you need that now, right?” But what they really mean is that they want to look like they’re keeping up with the trends, they want people to find them online and give them business that way without a lot of extra effort, and most of all, they want me to make them look good.

In fact, wanting to make them look good is a great motivation for gift-giving, too. After all, those canvas totes not only show off how green someone is, they can say something about their personality, too. And the travel mug can keep the coffee off the tie they got for Father’s day — assuming that’s a goal. And if I ever find earrings with little hanging bats, I know just who I’m going to give them to.