My 2025 Badass Goddesses calendar has landed… You can visit my Shop to order yours today. It’s the perfect gift for someone in your life who likes to look up from their phone once in a while and see something pretty hanging on the wall, and the perfect way to support real art in an increasingly AI-generated world!

It’s my first calendar in two years, and my first containing all new drawings since 2021. The 12 goddesses in my 2025 calendar are all from this year’s Pinktober exercise, so the style is a bit of a departure from previous years.

I’ll be taking up the Drawcember challenge next month, but I’ll probably stick with goddesses and mythical female creatures versus Christmas trees and candy canes, although that could be a great theme for a month of pinup drawings, in the grand tradition of pinup legends like Vargas and Olivia.

In addition to Drawcember, I’m thinking of branching out in different ways this coming year, maybe experimenting with different media. Inktober was a great crash course in colored pens, but I’m not in love with the way they force you to commit to a single color at a time, and if I’m going to continue using them, I’ll have to get some better paper.

Ink is seriously unforgiving, especially for someone so accustomed to using Photoshop to edit, paint, layer, create infinite variations, add filters, effects and patterns, not to mention those essentials “undo” and “content-aware fill.”

I don’t think I’m a watercolor kind of girl, for the same reasons I have misgivings about ink. In addition to being committed the instant your brush hits the paper, watercolors have the added quality of unpredictability. Once you place your color on the page, it can spread and dilute in ways you never intended, a perfectionist’s nightmare!

These monthly challenges are perfect for experimenting with different media, though. Before I started creating my calendars, back in the mid-2010s, I used colored pencils exclusively. They’re certainly more forgiving than ink. You can blend them and even erase them, to some degree, but the texture and richness of the color can be a crapshoot.

I was constantly sharpening (and breaking) them, struggling to find the right combination of smoothness and durability in my choice of paper to achieve the effect I wanted. I also went through every different style of sharpener, because colored pencils are waxier and softer than regular pencils and they’re murder on cheap sharpeners.

I would have to carry several cheap, plastic or steel portable sharpeners with me to drawing class because it’s very easy to break the pencil tips and then the blade get clogged up and you have to scrape it out with a razor knife over a trash can… which you can’t exactly carry with you to class.

I even tried electric pencil sharpeners, which were great at first, but they also wore out very quickly with so much use, and I started to feel guilty that my drawing was producing so much waste in the form of dead sharpeners.

The best solution (sadly not portable to class, either) was an old-timey elementary school style sharpener, the kind that was bolted to a wooden desk at the back of the classroom. They quickly ground my pencils to a perfect point, but also chewed them down to nothing a lot faster than the single blade variety. Sadly, they also only came in one size, so they were no good for the thick, waxy pencils that produced the richest colors.

I still have a drawer full of well-worn colored pencils, mostly flesh tones, and a veritable graveyard of sharpeners.

The first few calendars I created, starting in 2014, were all done using colored pencils, and before “badass goddesses,” they were “zodiac pinups.”

After a couple of years, I started scanning my drawings and finishing them in Photoshop, which marked the end of my love affair with colored pencils. I eventually realized the results were so much better if I scanned my drawings in black and white and colored them digitally.

I posted galleries of all my drawings back then, but they were in Flash (shoutout to the 1% of you who know what that is!) so of course they don’t play on modern browsers. Here are a few random favorites from 2015, all from the wonderful Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art Class (RIP).

Origin Story

I’ve been drawing since I was five years old and could grip a crayon in my hand, sitting at a tiny easel in my grandmother’s studio while she drew and painted and sculpted (mostly beautiful nude and semi-nude women… guess it runs in the family! lol).

I went to art school in Baltimore, MD in the 90s before Photoshop was even a thing, majoring in Illustration, but forging a lifelong love of basic drawing. My favorite medium at the time was charcoal, the messiest and most ephemeral of all drawing media.

After college, I promptly took the next 15 years off creating any kind of art as I focused on writing and eventually making websites for a living (plus a couple of years in retail and hospitality for character building). Most of my artwork from that time is packed away in a leather-bound portfolio at the back of my storage locker, but a few of my favorites are framed and prominently displayed in our apartment.

For years, friends would be shocked when they came over. “You drew that?! I didn’t know you were an artist!”

It wasn’t until 2010 that I started going to Dr. Sketchy’s every month, drawing for the first time in ages and getting muscle cramps in my shoulders and hands that left me whining in pain for days after every class.

A few more years and I started compiling 12 of my favorite drawings from the past year into calendars, at first zodiac pinups and later, badass goddesses. During the pandemic, when Dr. Sketchy’s shut down, I lost my inspiration for a few years, but now the journey continues…

Visit the shop to order your 2025 Badass Goddesses calendar today! Of course this comes right at the same time as the Canada Post mail strike, so if you’re not in Vancouver, we can either wait out the strike or make alternate shipping arrangements. If you’re in Vancouver, feel free to leave me a comment and we can arrange pick up downtown.