I usually just do my VPAs on Havi’s Blog, but I already did one and when this one came to me in the shower, I wanted to share it with a different audience.

Wanted: Face Wash

I’m looking for a new way to wash my face. While I love the facial cleansing oil I use now, using it takes up too much time and energy at a time when I’m usually at a low ebb. My new favorite face wash needs to:

• Be great for combination skin
• Be something quick and easy to use in the shower
• Clean pores, and it would be a bonus if there was also pore shrinking
• Neither dry out my face nor add too much oil
• Be hypo-allergenic, non-comedogenic, and generally very gentle
• Bonus if it active helps with acne and/or exfoliation
• Not require I use it more than once a day
• Not require extra products to make it awesome
• Not contain any of the following
• Mango
• Pomegranate
• Passion Fruit
• Pineapple
• Papaya
• Guava
• Tomato
• Papain
• Lanolin
• Preferably be mostly natural, for all that
• Not be crazy expensive, though a bit pricey is okay if a little goes a long way
• Smell awesome, or not like much of anything at all, but especially not be perfumey

I’d also love to find a moisturizer that doesn’t give me zits, but as I have never seen such a mythical product before, I’m not gonna hold my breath.

Reading this list it sounds a bit like I’m always battling the zits for my life, but it’s really not true — I’d just like to go from few to very few, y’know? I’m 36, I shouldn’t be dealing with this crap still.

Anyway, if anyone has any recommendations, I’d love to hear them!

Actually, it’s two contests in one. I’m promoting both Not Dead Yet Studios and its sister site, Antemortem Arts, so I’m giving away a prize from each site.

The Prizes:

• Be a Cartoon! Get yourself made into a nifty cartoon character, for use in web or print, however you want to do it. Since it’s a giveaway, I’ll even send you the original free! A $45 value.
• Tiny Painting! Brighten up a corner of your world with a teeny little painting on its very own wooden easel, of nearly anything your heart desires. A $60 value.

The Rules:

• Comment here to enter, and include a valid email address so I can contact you if you win!
• Let me know in your comment whether you want the Cartoon, the Painting, or Either. It will be two separate drawings, with two different winners.
• Random numbers will decide, probably using polyhedral dice for maximum geekiness.
• Drawing will take place at the end of the day on Friday 1/8/2010. Unless I forget, and then it’ll be Saturday.
• Winners will be notified and, once they’ve accepted, posted here so you all know who got lucky.
• Prizes are good for 6 months, though of course I’m hoping you’ll be so excited you’ll want to get started right away!

Got any questions? The comments are good for that, too, or you can email me privately.

Good luck!

Entries are now CLOSED! Winners announced soon.

I’ve added a new service (actually, I had it all along, but it didn’t have its own page) — Cartoonified You.

I’ve been developing my own style as an illustrator over the past few years, and I’m finally feeling comfortable enough doing little comic-art people to offer it as a service to someone other than me.

I’ve done pets before, and I’m happy to add them in, but pets are as individual as people, which is why it’s on the “extras” list. A few props are fine, and in fact expected to add to the you-ness of it, but your giant mad science machine for summoning the Elder Gods to this dimension would definitely require an extra fee. Your laptop, on the other hand, would definitely be included. Unless it’s got Cthulhu on the screen, because risk of insanity is always extra.

So how much, you ask? A mere $40 for a cartoon of you, for use in web or print.

Come on, you know you want one.

This year two of my very good friends commissioned me to design their Christmas cards, and I had great fun with the illustration. They’ve got 3 cats, who we decided needed to be the stars of the show, as it were, all up to their usual mischief.

That’s Eddie down at the bottom playing Godzilla with the Nativity, Lucy at the top making contact with the Cthulhu tree topper, and Jessica can be seen playing impostor ornament in the middle of the tree. It’s done with ink & Copic markers, and was a lot of fun (except inking the tree, which was insanely tedious, but I love the effect so I will pretend to myself it was fun).

A Merry, Mischievous Christmas to everyone, whether or not you celebrate — it’s still an awesome excuse for a day off!

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about procrastination. It’s been a lifelong habit of mine, good or bad, and it’s funny that I interact with it on so many levels and for so many things.

For instance, showering. I love being in the shower, it’s warm and there’s water and when I’m done I’m clean and it’s awesome. And yet, every single day, it’s a battle to get myself into the shower. It makes me wonder what stuck I’ve got about showering, though I have a sneaking suspicion it’s more about what comes after. After the shower comes work, starting the day, doing the things on the to-do list. Before the shower, the day hasn’t really started, right?

And then I wonder, is making one change at a time another way of putting off my Somedays? Many of those sorts of people who supposedly know about these things say make one change at a time, concentrate on one thing. But if I’m spending up to 3 months developing one habit, what else am I putting off? Yeah, I need to floss every day, and that’s an important habit to create, but at the same time there are other habits that are equally important, but they’re for scarier goals. I want to draw every day, too, but I can put off building that habit simply by saying I’m learning to clean the catbox every day first.

There’s also “structured procrastination” (which I often find myself doing accidentally), wherein I schedule the Big Scary Thing, and then a bunch of lesser things I’ve also been putting off, and find myself barrelling through those lesser items tick-tick-tick to prove I’m busy so I don’t really have to do the Big Scary Thing just yet. Which is awesome when you do it on purpose, and slightly less awesome when it happens by accident (but still useful).

I finally got around one big procrastination step by having my darling Mum get me something really useful for Christmas this year — Havi’s Procrastination Dissolve-o-Matic. I haven’t read more than the awesome Fairy Dust yet, but I want to say that I already love it, not so much because I tried it but because she gave me permission not to do the part that was hard. There was a nifty face mudra thing with pressure points, and I started to do it but my glasses got in the way and my fingernails poked me so I stopped and read down the page — and Havi gave both permission not to do it, and an alternative for people with glasses and fingernails and other in-the-way-nesses.

And that, I think, is an important piece of the puzzle — permission to find a different way for myself, whatever that way will be.

Since I have a young and rambunctious cat, I don’t have a tree this year, so I repeated last year’s holiday decorations with a few variations. Different ornaments along the top, a better distribution of lights, and my newly cleaned-off games bookshelf gave me an opportunity to better display my complete fangirly dorkiness.

If you click the image it’ll get bigger, and you can see the nutcracker matryoshka dolls down in the lower left, the various ornaments strung along the top with the lights, and the Winnie-the-Pooh tree sculpture down the row from the nutcrackers. From left to right the ornaments are a lovely standard Christmas ball, a One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish ornament from Hallmark, a Winnie-the-Pooh Christmas ball, a Jack-in-the-Box snowman, Oogie Boogie with a wreath, a rainbow glass lightning bolt, a pewter Pooh-n-Piglet, and a blue plushie Peep a friend of mine converted to an ornament.

I also strung up some icicles to spruce up my other wall:

The items in the shadowboxes stay there all year round, though I did move the bronze roses up to the top boxes instead of the middle ones.

There’s also a few stockings hung up here and there, my Nightmare Before Christmas one is out of frame next to the shadowboxes, and I put up my set of 3 Pooh Bear ones (Pooh, Eeyore and Tigger) in the bedroom where they’ll smile at me as I drift off to sleep.

In addition, for the curious, this is the work in progress currently sitting on my easel:

All this holiday cheer is mostly for me, something to look up at when I’m working and make me smile, to remind me of all the reasons I love this time of year.

So, happy holidays to you all, whichever and whenever they are — and remember, when someone insists on a “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays,” it’s always appropriate to wish them a miserable New Year in reply.

Flow is that magic place where work keeps happening smoothly and easily, and the next time I look up from what I’ve been doing it’s done and time has passed me on by.

I can get into a good state of Flow with writing, designing, and even seeming scut work like website updates, and when I do, it reminds me of why I do what I do. It’s when I can’t seem to find my way into that space that I get frustrated and behind, so this post is to remind me of the things that (sometimes) work to get things Flowing.

• Make a cup of tea, and don’t forget to drink it.
• Just get started.
• Make a list of what needs to be done, and check things off as I finish them.
• Play a game of something brain-stimulating.
• Open one file, and do something easy.
• Close a bunch of tabs until the browser no longer mocks me with its waiting articles.
• Eat a piece of chocolate or two.
• Set up all the equipment for it – open the Scrivener doc, get out the Wacom tablet, pull out some paint tubes, get out the Copic markers, take the computer to the scanner desk.
• Put on some really embarrassingly rockin’ ’80s tunes and go clean something small, just to get the blood flowing.
• Take a shower.
• Move to a different spot.
• Put up an away message on IM and tell people I’m working.
• Pick one thing, and start.

Obviously, some of these tricks are me-specific, but some of them would work for other people. I’ve often found that, no matter how much I’m avoiding something, if I just start it then that resistance skulks away in the face of my obvious productivity.

Also, chocolate really does help.

Do you have any tricks you use to get into the Flow of things?

I finally got the Antemortem Arts site put together enough to admit that it exists. There’s still a lot (seriously, a lot) of art left to be put up, and some things need refining, and a certain minion’s got to help me get the gallery plugin working this weekend, but…

It’s up!

Go visit Antemortem Arts — even if you’re just looking, it’s okay. That’s what art is for, y’know?

Last night I went into the depths of the guest bathroom (for use only by cats) and brought out two big dusty boxes, still sealed from my move. I cleaned them of their lightly-scented clay dust coating, opened them up, and pulled out a big pile of my history.

And holy crap, that was a lot of art.

It was pretty cathartic to go through, deciding what I liked well enough to eventually put up on Etsy or my (soon to be launched) new art site, and what I wanted to keep for sentiment or self-archiving purposes. The best pile, though, is the rejects.

Stuff I was never that happy with, but kept because I had teachers who said, “Never throw anything away.” Stuff I liked once but have grown out of or away from. Stuff that just never quite came together right. Stuff I hated right off the bat.

Old Stuff.

I have a pile of it in the corner now, but one piece has already been sacrificed to the Etsy gods — I took a mediocre monoprint, cut it up and remade it into a gorgeous blue origami gift box, sturdy and rough and interesting. And now it sits atop that pile of Stuff and reminds me that there’s no such thing as a failure in art, because old art becomes new art supplies.

And the best part, of course, was revisiting old pieces that I do still love, and thinking about whether I’m ready to show them to other people, to send them off to new homes, to get them out of their dusty prisons and into the world where they belong.

And you know what? I think I am.

I always have trouble deciding, when asked my favorite time of year. I love the growing warmth and green of spring (despite the pollen), but all the best holidays are at the end of the year when winter’s on the way.

Halloween, of course, is one of my favorites, with its emphasis on identity and mystery. And Christmas, when the whole country stops being quite so nasty and remembers that charity really is a virtue worth pursuing. Plus, I love giving presents. And getting them. I know other people have other winter holidays, but secular Christmas is pretty unavoidable in the US, both the rise in charitable donations, and the ridiculous consumerist push.

So here’s my one bit of gift-giving advice that works every time: Give the person something that, when you hand it over, you can genuinely say, “I thought of you when I saw this.”

It really is the thought that counts, too, because often in the rush to check names off of a list gifts are chosen quite thoughtlessly. Rather than finding one item that makes you think of a friend or loved one, you rush and grab and move on to the next store and the next holiday sale, because that’s what everyone else is doing.

As decluttering is on the rise, let’s try to do this for each other this gift-giving season — don’t add to someone else’s clutter. If your dad hasn’t been hinting about wanting a new electric razor, don’t give him something he won’t use because he’s always preferred blades. If your mom isn’t a perfume wearer, don’t clutter up her bathroom or dresser top with another bottle that’ll evaporate before it gets used. And for goodness sake, don’t buy those kitschy wooden apple-themed teacher gifts unless the teacher actually collects such things.

So what do you do when nothing stands out? Try rethinking the reason why you’re struggling so hard to get them a gift in the first place. If it’s someone you wish you knew better, considering giving them the gift of a dinner out together, so next year you’ll know that they have a secret collection of undead bunny figurines or they love anything with a frog on it. If it’s your child’s teacher, consider a donation to education, a classroom fund, or a gift certificate to a favorite restaurant so they can enjoy a night away from grading and lesson plans.

It is the thought that counts — so make sure you really think this year about what would enhance the lives of your loved ones, instead of trying to fill a quota.