X Minus 10 Days...

Not much of a blog entry here, but a few things of note.

First off, I did indeed drop off the drum ornaments at the store. I also finished two more drums (pictured above) as requests... or so I was led to believe. Evidently, the lady who asked about the hummer was really fishing for a cheap artist for a personal project. I may not be the greatest artist on the planet or the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I know better than to work for dirt... But it's the other drum, the owl, that is noteworthy. Why? Why indeed... it is noteworthy because it is the first item I have not only created specifically for sale, but which actually sold. Yep, it sold. Cash in the store till and out the door sold. I have another request (black panther) which I need to finish before Friday, which is apparently a done deal in the sale department once I deliver the goods. I've already had my celebratory Peanut Buster Parfait at DQ just for taking the things to the store... I'll have to think of something else to do to celebrate a sale. (Okay, so the PBP was a split celebration of that and of the second anniversary of Hell... I still need to come up with something else to celebrate a sale with, because, much as I like them, there are only Peanut Buster Parfaits one can eat in a given timeframe.)

Now, this success has not been without a cost. What, you may ask, has been the cost? Well, for one thing, my websites haven't been touched - and I mean not even looked at - since the end of October. Skyhaven fans, sorry, but nothing is going to be added until after the new year. (I promise I'll make it worth the wait... there are at least three species I want to bring back to Skyhaven, either to the main lairs or to the Hunt, so when I do update it ought to be a biggie.) On the plus side, I'm tearing through my sketchbook doing preliminary work on my drum designs, since I like sketching out the images a few times before I attempt to paint them - fixing the forms in my mind, so to speak - so this can only mean good things when I sit down to do Skyhaven critter templates.

Another price has been my personal ornament work. Fortunately, I'm only sending a few out of the house this year, but I'm just now getting going on those. With timing and the nasty weather out thataways I'll be lucky if they get to their destination before the spring thaw even if I pull of a miracle and get them done by Monday. As for the stuff I won't be shipping, odds are I'll end up using drum ornament blanks for those, too. Which, of course, means all the painstaking scale drawings I worked on earlier this year are so much wasted paper. Oh, well...

And, of course, there was my card design. I wanted to do my own card design again this year, because it's been a few years since I even wanted to try doing a card design and, dang it, I wanted to do one. Unfortunately, my artistic muse took a bribe from the Dread Demon Reality and left me high and dry, after leaving just enough hints of ideas in my brain to keep me throwing myself against the brick wall of my sketchpad until now.

As a topper, my sinuses picked yesterday - the first day off I've ever taken at my job, and then only because they insisted I burn off the floating holiday I never used all year - to attack. I've always thought that human sinus cavities, prone to illness and infection and general misery-inducement as they are, provide the ultimate proof against our creation by some manner of benevolent entity (assuming, of course, that it intended humans to be its crowning achievement, rather than simply hosts for the microscopic lifeforms which truly thrive from such a lousy design)... But, I will not be deterred. It's actually a bit of a relief to be hitting panic stage at this point; last year, I finished two days early and nearly went berserk without family projects to keep me awake on Xmas Eve.

So, I suppose I'd best head off. It's too late to paint, but I have plenty of other projects to keep me occupied, and the Dread Demon Reality is going to have its hands full stopping me from finishing them all.